Today the primary groundfish fisheries of the North Sea, Barents Sea, Iceland, West Greenland, the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and Georges Bank of New England have been severely over-exploited or are closed due to the collapse of overfished stocks. Only the groundfish fisheries of the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska, and particularly the pollock fisheries of the Bering Sea, continue to support high levels of exploitation. As a result, Bering Sea pollock has displaced cod as the primary food fish in the world market, turning up as fish sticks, imitation crab meat and fillets around the world. 17 Catches of Pacific ocean perch, Pacific herring and yellowfin sole reached record levels by the early 1960s, followed by collapses as each stock was fished down. As stocks of one species crashed, the fleets shifted their effort to another.
Some companies operate a mother-ship system or other group system in conjunction with transports.
But we prefer a single-ship system. The Katata Maru was a forerunner of the giant pollock-processing trawlers to come, such as the 5,300 gross ton Tenyo Maru, introduced by Taiyo in the early 1970s. The number of Japanese factory trawlers in the Eastern Bering Sea increased ten-fold between 1964 and 1972, when record harvests of pollock were extracted from the Eastern Bering Sea. Landings increased from 175,000 metric tons in 1964 to 1.9 million metric tons in 1972, most of which was caught by the Japanese fleet. By the early 1970s, indications of overfishing in the Eastern Bering Sea pollock stocks were evident.