For now, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game will not be opening a new commercial fishery for magister armhook squid in Southeast Alaska. The Alaska Board of Fisheries voted down a proposal to open a jig fishery for the squid species on Saturday during their triennial regulatory meeting on Southeast fishery regulations in Ketchikan.
Richard Yamada proposed the idea to the board. Yamada owns a sportfishing lodge near Juneau and serves as the U.S. commissioner of the International Pacific Halibut Commission.
“It’s the most abundant squid in Alaska waters but very underutilized,” Yamada told the seven-person board. Yamada said he’s spent years investigating if there is a market for the squid.
According to him, there is a strong global demand for the squid. It’s a staple of restaurant menus in Japan. Yamada said the biggest exporters of the squid, though, are China and Russia and due to geopolitical factors, those markets are down.
“I think it’s time for Alaska to get into the squid market because of the lack of economies and the high demand for squid,” Yamada said during the Board’s deliberations.
Yamada won a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2023 to look into building a market for Alaska’s magister squid. He said he presented samples of his local squid catch to professional sushi chefs in Japan and Los Angeles.
Yamada shared a letter from Takeshi Suda, a sushi chef in Japan’s Yamagata Prefecture. Suda wrote that the “thickness and clean white color of [Alaska magister squid] makes it excellent for sashimi and plated dishes.” The chef also said that the squid’s tentacles “yielded soft and tender meat when fried and grilled.”
Magister squid are usually reddish-brown and can grow to over 2 feet long. They’re native to the waters of the North Pacific and commonly found around Japan, the Aleutian Islands, and Southeast Alaska. Yamada said they usually only live about one year.
There used to be a big Japanese trawl fishery for magister squid in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska. Yamada said they were harvesting thousands of tons every year, until the U.S. pushed the foreign fishermen out of federal waters following the passage of the Magnuson–Stevens Act in the late 1970s.
Yamada claimed in his proposal that opening up commercial squid harvest could provide another revenue stream for struggling commercial fishermen and cut down on the squid eating more prized catches like salmon and crab. The proposal was backed by the Juneau-Douglas Fish and Game Advisory Committee.
“I think there are some fundamental questions,” Fish and Game Commissioner Doug Vincent-Lang said about the proposed commercial fishery. He applauded Yamada’s ingenuity but he said without biological or catch data – or any real idea of how many of these squid are in Southeast waters – the department wouldn’t be able to establish a sustainable management plan.
“We don’t have the sustainability piece of this one quite figured out yet,” Vinvent-Lang said. “I’m looking forward to what my staff have to say for an element of a management plan, but clearly I think we can probably do something in a couple years when we figure out that sustainability piece and also the market piece.”
Boardmember Gerad Godfrey also questioned the market itself, fearing a crash if China and Russia resume exports.
“He’s talking about a jig fishery,” Seth Rockwell, a local dive fisherman, said in support of Yamada’s proposal. “It’s a very low impact fishery with low chance of overharvest. Opening up a jig fishery may expand this out a little more, to allow them to get more data, to allow them to move this to the next step to make this a viable fishery.”
Board of Fisheries Chair Märit Carlson-Van Dort said she’s excited about the idea, even if she feels it isn’t quite ripe yet.
“One of the elements I’d like to see in the future, because I don’t know if I can support it at this time but what I’m really, really interested in is what the harvest need would be to establish a market and production requirements and all the things,” she said.
Nearly every member of the board expressed excitement about the idea as a “pleasant surprise” and something they hope to hear more about during their next meeting on Southeast Alaska fisheries in 2028.
The proposal failed 5-2.
