Billion-Dollar Fish: The Untold Story of Alaska Pollock

Alaska pollock is everywhere. If you’re eating fish but you don’t know what kind it is, it’s almost certainly pollock.Prized for its generic fish taste, pollock masquerades as crab meat in california rolls and seafood salads, and it feeds millions as fish sticks in school cafeterias and Filet-O-Fish sandwiches at McDonald’s.That ubiquity has made pollock the most lucrative fish harvest in America-the fishery in the United States alone has an annual value of over one billion dollars.But even as the money rolls in, pollock is in trouble: in the last few years, the pollock population has declined by more than half, and some scientists are predicting the fishery’s eventual collapse. In Billion-Dollar Fish, Kevin M. Bailey combines his years of firsthand pollock research with a remarkable talent for storytelling to offer the first natural history of Alaska pollock.Crucial to understanding the pollock fishery, he shows, is recognizing what aspects of its natural history make pollock so very