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The Bering Sea Ecosystem (1996) / Chapter Skim
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Executive Summary
Pages 1-6

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From page 1...
... Today, approximately 25 species of fish, crustaceans, and mollusks of the Bering Sea are considered important commercially. Despite a variety of recent protections for marine mammals, birds, and fish resources afforded by laws of the United States and Russia and a number of international agreements, some species of the Bering Sea and adjacent regions have undergone large and sometimes sudden population fluctuations.
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From page 2...
... Fishing and hunting of marine mammals by Aleuts and Eskimos have occurred for hundreds of years at least; intensive exploitation of Bering Sea marine resources by the United States, Russia, Japan, and other nations began in the eighteenth century and increased in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Exploitation by indigenous peoples affected the abundance and community structures of marine resources, especially close to shore, and, coupled with natural fluctuations, led to occasional food shortages.
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From page 3...
... King crab populations and their fisheries increased in the early 1970s, and then collapsed again in the early 1980s. Several eastern Bering Sea finfish populations grew rapidly in the late 1970s and early 1980s while one flatfish species and a number of forage species appear to have declined significantly.
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From page 4...
... Another difficulty was the lack of good information from the former Soviet Union. As a result, the committee concludes that a data rescue and archiving project should be initiated immediately to preserve physical and biological information on the Bering Sea currently residing in the former Soviet Union, as well as information on resource use and conservation.
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From page 5...
... Management and Institutional Recommendations The committee identified four basic problems that need to be solved to achieve proper management of the Bering Sea ecosystem: the lack of knowledge and inherent limitations on understanding and predictability, incomplete specification of management objectives, lack of appropriate domestic institutional structures through which to make and implement coordinated management decisions on either side of the Bering Sea, and the limited ability to coordinate domestic management with users and management agencies of other nations. The committee recommends the following steps to address these problems: • Improve the coordination of the many institutional structures that make management decisions concerning resource use in the Bering Sea.
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From page 6...
... It also follows that actions with respect to single species will have complex consequences that will be hard to predict. Simply changing exploitation rates on a single species -- pollock, for example -- is unlikely to have easily predictable effects on other ecosystem components -- marine mammals, for example.
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Key Terms

  • sea ecosystem
  • marine mammals
  • eastern bering
  • human exploitation
  • exploitation rates

  • intensive exploitation
  • western bering
  • sea resources
  • steller sea
  • sea lions

  • marine resources
  • food shortages
  • living resources
  • trawl fisheries
  • indigenous peoples

  • environmental changes
  • especially juveniles
  • eighteenth century
  • natural fluctuations
  • pribilof islands

  • fishing effort
  • sea marine
  • major bering
  • sea fish
  • sea pollock

  • sea shelf
  • sea rookeries
  • sea currently
  • sea finfish
  • marine mammal


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