Alaska's fish top export.

Alaska is the world's top producer of wild salmon, eclipsing Russia, China and Japan, according to research by Gunnar Knapp, an economics professor and fisheries expert at the Institute of Social and Economic Research in Anchorage.

The state produces nearly 80 percent of the world's supply of wild king, sockeye and coho, all high-dollar species. Although salmon constituted just 18 percent of the total volume of seafood caught in Alaska in 2010, it accounted for 35 percent of the export value, according to the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute.

Times have been good lately for Alaska's commercial salmon fishermen with prices on the rise. Wholesale salmon prices jumped from $1.31 per pound in 2002 to $2.45 per pound in 2010, according to the Juneau-based research firm, McDowell Group. During this same period, the total value of salmon permits also rose from $205 million to nearly $521 million.

Salmon is just one of Alaska's top commercial fish species. The other notables include herring, halibut, shellfish and ground fish.

Ground fish--namely pollock, cod, rockfish, hake and haddock--are the big kids on the block. Some 43 percent of the export volume of Alaska seafood came from pollock in 2010, according to ASMI.

Alaska's ground fish harvest is one of the world's largest commercial fisheries. According to a study published in 2009 by Northern Economics, a research firm with offices in Anchorage and Bellingham, Wash., Alaska ground fish and flat fish made up about one-fifth of the world's catch of these species in 2006.

All told...