John,

Located between Alaska and Russia, the northern Bering Sea is home to an abundance of Arctic wildlife. Small clams, shrimp-like crustaceans, and marine worms live on the shallow seafloor and feed animals like walruses, bearded seals and bowhead whales — plus nearly the entire global population of spectacled eiders in the winter.

This biodiverse place, along with parts of the Arctic Ocean, could soon be destroyed by commercial bottom-trawl fishing nets dragged across the seafloor for “research.”

Bottom trawling is one of the most destructive fishing practices on Earth. Massive trawl nets scrape the seafloor and catch everything in their wake — including whales and seals who get entangled and drown. The nets destroy fragile marine ecosystems and release huge amounts of climate-warming carbon stored in the seafloor.

The Alaska Fisheries Science Center — the Alaska research branch of NOAA Fisheries, a federal agency — plans to accelerate new bottom-trawling research in the northern Bering Sea as early as next summer. This sensitive area is currently protected from commercial bottom-trawl gear, but the Science Center thinks its activities should be exempt because the gear will be used for commercial fishing research instead of commercial fishing for market.

It also plans to expand its bottom-trawl research into the Chukchi Sea in the Arctic Ocean, where all commercial fishing is banned.

It’s bad enough to allow bottom-trawl gear in these pristine waters for research. But these bottom-trawling studies and surveys could lead to opening the northern Bering Sea and Arctic Ocean to commercial bottom-trawl fishing.

Help protect Arctic wildlife. Tell NOAA Fisheries you strongly oppose all use of bottom-trawl gear in the northern Bering Sea and Arctic Ocean — period.