The halibut fishery of the North Pacific — long touted as a model for wise fisheries management and the goodness of privatizing commercial fisheries — is now in such dire straits regulators on Wednesday were talking about the possibility of cutting harvests to levels not seen since the 1930s.
The problem? Adult flatfish are disappearing from the population at unexplainable rates, the International Pacific Halibut Commission was told Wednesday at a meeting in Seattle.
Adult fish comprise what the scientists who work for the commission call the “exploitable biomass.” These are the halibut capable of breeding and reproducing.
These are also the fish targeted by commercial fishermen.
“Seventy percent of the total commercial catch is female,” commission lead biologist Steven Hare said. The most common halibut caught by commercial longliners, according to commission studies, are 12-year-old females. Those fish comprise more than 15 percent of the entire commercial catch. If life has gone well for such halibut, and they’ve grown fast enough, they’ll likely get to spawn once before they’re killed. Commission studies indicate about 50 percent of females reach sexual maturity by age 12.
Those that live to be 13 have an even better chance of getting to spawn, but they are also heavily harvested. They comprise more than 10 percent of the commercial catch, according to Hare. All told commercial fishermen take more than a quarter of the allowable harvest of halibut just as the fish are fully reaching spawning age.
But that is not the real problem at the moment, Hare said. The real problem is what he called “unspecified mortality.” Halibut are disappearing from the population for reasons managers can only guess at. “It’s troubling,” Hare said.
Were managers to take these mystery disappearances fully into consideration, he added, they would be forced to recommend drastic cuts in commercial harvests.
