For years, rebuilding of West Coast groundfish stocks has been held up as one of the great success stories in American fisheries management. NOAA once called it the “comeback of the century,” celebrating the rebound of stocks that had been declared overfished in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But according to an analysis from University of Washington researchers, there’s another side to that story, one that the industry has long felt firsthand.
“Stocks were rebuilt, but at a great cost to the industry and U.S. food production,” Ray Hilborn, professor at the University of Washington, wrote in an email to National Fisherman.
Hilborn pointed to research he co-authored examining whether West Coast groundfish stocks could have rebuilt under less restrictive management measures, and whether fishermen, processors, and coastal communities paid a steeper economic price than necessary during the recovery process.
“What NOAA doesn’t advertise is that if no rebuilding plans had been implemented, $886 million in additional revenue would have been made by the fishing fleets, and the stocks would have rebuilt, but more slowly,” Hilborn wrote.
The paper, published in Fisheries Research in 2021, evaluated alternative rebuilding strategies for the West Coast groundfish fishery, focusing on the mixed-stock nature of the fishery and the tradeoffs between rapid rebuilding and maintaining fishing opportunity.
The researchers – Kristin McQuaw, Andre Punt and Hilborn – revisited rebuilding plans implemented after 10 West Coast groundfish stocks were declared overfished between 1999 and 2010. Federal managers dramatically reduced catch limits to meet strict rebuilding timelines required under the Magnuson-Stevens Act, in some cases cutting catches to as low as 1.26 percent of previous peak levels.
The consequences rippled through the fleet.
According to the study, non-whiting groundfish catches fell from more than 80,000 metric tons to less than 30,000 metric tons. Processors disappeared, markets were lost, and the number of first receivers dropped from 113 between 1996 and 2000 to just 40 by 2011.
“The fishery was declared a federal failure in 2000 in response to the economic disaster resulting from the reduced catch limits,” the paper noted. Still, the rebuilding effort succeeded biologically. By 2019, nine of the 10 overfished stocks had rebuilt above their targets.
The question McQuaw and her co-authors asked was whether those stocks could have rebuilt under a less restrictive approach, one based on fishing mortality targets rather than strict timelines.
Using updated stock assessments and modeling alternative harvest strategies, the researchers concluded that a slower rebuilding approach could have preserved significantly more fishing opportunity while still rebuilding the stocks.
The study states, “We estimate that an additional $886 million in ex-vessel revenue could have been obtained had an FMSY (fishing mortality at maximum sustainable yield) strategy permitting slower rebuilding rates been adopted.”
The researchers also found that several stocks likely would have rebuilt even if 1995 fishing mortality rates had continued. Under one modeled strategy based on fishing at levels designed to achieve maximum sustainable yield, stocks rebuilt more slowly but still recovered while allowing far greater harvests.
That distinction matters in mixed-stock fisheries, where fishermen targeting abundant species can be shut down by extremely low quotas on weaker stocks caught alongside them.
“There are consequently trade-offs between the yield obtained during rebuilding and the rate of rebuilding,” the paper says. The study argues that strict rebuilding schedules prevented harvesters from accessing healthy and abundant species such as Dover sole, sablefish, and thornyheads because they were caught together with rebuilding rockfish species.
One example shared by the researchers, widow rockfish, was declared overfished in 2001. But 2005 and later stock assessments suggested the stock may never actually have fallen below the overfished threshold in the first place. Even so, the stock remained under rebuilding restrictions until 2012.
The paper also notes that scientific understanding of stock productivity changed significantly during the rebuilding period. Early assessments, based on best information available at that time, that many rockfish stocks were far less productive than later research showed, leading managers to adopt extremely conservative rebuilding plans.
Their findings support those of the National Research Council, which in 2014 reported that rebuilding plans based on fishery mortality rates may be preferable to those focused on meeting strict rebuilding timelines.
The paper doesn’t argue against rebuilding depleted stocks, but it instead it questions whether management frameworks should place greater emphasis on balancing conservation goals with food production, fishing opportunity and the survival of fishing communities.
The research concludes, “The U.S. West Coast sacrificed fishing opportunities and associated community stability to rebuild stocks quicker than the maximum time permitted under the Magnuson Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management Act.”
For fishermen who lived through the collapse of processing infrastructure, lost permits, tied-up boats, and shrinking markets during the rebuilding years, the paper offered academic backing to what many in the industry have argued for decades: that the fish came back, but the cost of bringing them back may have been far higher than it needed to be.
