- In 2000, the U.S. commerce secretary declared the groundfish fishery on the U.S. West Coast a “disaster,” with 10 key species overfished to below a quarter of their healthy levels.
- Fisheries authorities empowered by federal conservation laws took drastic action: They cut off vast tracts of the ocean to trawling, slashed fishing quotas and bought fishing vessels to remove them from operation. Many fishers were thrown into painful retirement.
- Careful management and innovation in the intervening years has led to a remarkable turnaround: In October 2025, fishery officials declared the last of the 10 overfished species to be rebuilt, years earlier than expected, and fishers have catches they thought would never be possible again.
- Even so, fishers’ profits have been low, and experts worry that key conservation programs could lose their teeth to cost-cutting measures and deregulation.
PORT ORFORD, Oregon, U.S. — Aaron Longton reached down into the rinsing sink in his garage-turned-fish-processing facility on the Oregon coast and hoisted a redbanded rockfish by its fat bottom lip. The homely fish was next in line for the dressing table, where Brian Morrissey, Longton’s “cutter-in-chief,” would deftly slice it into neat fillets, setting aside its guts and bones for crabbing chum.
Morrisey had about 250 kilograms (550 pounds) of the rockfish (Sebastes babcocki) to get through that day, and 90 kg (200 lbs) of lingcod (Ophiodon elongatus), he said, his knife unzipping yet another fish. An unthinkable abundance only 20 years ago.
“These fish were really severely limited to us,” said Longton, founder of Port Orford Sustainable Seafood, a company that sells fish via a subscription program. “Now, we have huge quotas.”
The groundfish Longton hauls to his processing room from the pier down the street are the spoils of a painstakingly rebuilt industry. Twenty-six years ago, the West Coast groundfish industry, which encompasses more than 90 species of bottom-dwelling fish off Washington, Oregon and California, had overfished itself to near devastation. In response, fisheries authorities closed vast tracts of the ocean to trawling and slashed fishing quotas, throwing many fishers into painful retirement.
But in the aftermath, an unlikely corps materialized of fishers, scientists, conservationists and government, all intent on rebuilding the fishery with sustainability as a core principle. They jointly innovated fishing quotas, organized a strict program to monitor fishing vessels, modified trawling gear and conducted years of meticulous stocktaking and research.
In October 2025, the program reached a critical milestone. Fishery officials declared yelloweye rockfish (S. ruberrimus) — the last of the 10 groundfish species once overfished to below a quarter of their healthy levels — rebuilt. All groundfish are now at healthy stock levels, years earlier than expected.
“Fisheries on the West Coast are being really, really well-managed,” Waldo Wakefield, an ocean ecology and fishing gear researcher affiliated with Oregon State University, told Mongabay. From 1999-2018, Wakefield was involved in the fishery’s reconstruction as a biologist at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, part of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The West Coast groundfish fishery in particular, he said, “is pretty enlightened.”
Disaster response
Things looked much different 26 years ago. In 2000, then-Secretary of Commerce William Daley declared the West Coast groundfish industry a “disaster,” a jarring distinction meant to release federal relief funds to the fishery as mandated by U.S. laws.
The declaration also prompted an immediate reduction in catch quotas of the 10 overfished species to essentially zero, even as accidental bycatch. The Pacific Fisheries Management Council, one of the main entities overseeing the West Coast groundfish fishery, advised NOAA to close nearly 52,000 square kilometers (20,000 square miles) of ocean to groundfish trawlers, shuttering most of the fishing grounds.
In 2002, Congress offered to buy out any trawl fishers willing to leave the now tightly restricted fishery. The government purchased and permanently removed 91 vessels and 239 fishing permits for a total of $46 million. Fishers who stayed had to pay the government back most of that debt, which should be fulfilled by 2028.
About 40% of the fleet sold or moved to Alaska, Wakefield said. “The really successful fishermen stayed,” he said.
The government is empowered to such strong-arming by an unusually conservation-minded 1976 law called the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, Wakefield said. Originally conceived to expel foreign fishing boats from within 322 km (200 mi) of U.S. coasts, it was updated in 1996 to allow the federal government to rigorously monitor fish stocks and prevent overfishing.
In January 2007, while the West Coast groundfish industry was still mostly locked down, then-President George W. Bush reauthorized and strengthened the act. Now it bound fisheries management councils to set catch limits based on sound scientific advice. It also encouraged catch share programs to replace the fishing quota model that had reigned before. Trawlers once rushed to sea at the beginning of the fishing season to catch as much as possible as fast as possible before the fishery’s collective yearly limit was reached.
“It was a gold rush,” Longton said. “It was like, all or nothing.”
The new catch share model, adopted by the West Coast groundfish fishery in 2010, assigns each permit-holder an individual fishing quota that they can fill anytime during the year or sell to another fisher. Tribal fishers’ quotas are calculated separately depending on the tribe’s agreements with fisheries, either as a fixed percentage or an off-the-top amount.
The fishery’s management had another big growth spurt in 2011, when it imposed a 100% monitoring scheme on trawlers. Every single groundfish trawling expedition was required to bring a certified independent observer along for the ride. Big vessels that spend nights at sea had to bring two. Tribal and non-trawl fisheries, however, need not comply.
Time has smoothed away the sting of that period, but many fishers saw the changes as “a huge threat” to the success of their businesses, Longton said. “It was contentious.”
Recovery
From a conservation standpoint, the austerity measures were a success. Today, the fish are back. NOAA didn’t expect those slow-growing yelloweye rockfish, the ones declared rebuilt in October 2025, to rebound until 2084.
“We talk a lot about how the U.S. is kind of the gold standard,” said Kate Kauer, fisheries strategy lead for the nonprofit The Nature Conservancy in California, which in 2006 privately bought out trawl permits and vessels from California groundfish fishers, then leased and eventually returned those permits to fishers under a conservation-focused catch structure.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization echoed that accolade in its 2025 review of world marine fisheries. And the West Coast groundfish fishery’s trawl sector even picked up its own eco-certification from the U.K.-based nonprofit Marine Stewardship Council in 2014.
With fish stocks on a healthy rebound, by 2025 the federal government unlocked the gates and opened up most of the previously closed 52,000 km2 to fishing. However, California controls its coastal waters, with 7% permanently closed to most fishing, and another 9% strictly closed to all fishing, for a total of 16%. The state governor has pledged to expand these marine protected areas to 30% by 2030.
Innovation in gear design is also improving sustainability, Wakefield said.
Today, sensors let fishers know when their nets are tangled, or when they are full up with fish. Net adjustments encourage nontarget species to swim out of the way. LED lights scare off potential bycatch. And, critically, semi-pelagic trawls, a modification on bottom trawling, keep the most damaging heavy gear off the seafloor.
“That’s been an enormous area of consternation and battle between the fishing industry and the conservation groups,” said Wakefield, who has worked on gear design with fishing companies in Newport, Oregon, for about 15 years.
Despite these advancements, bottom trawling is still widely considered incredibly harmful to the seafloor environment.
In addition, Wakefield said scientists now have a much better understanding of essential groundfish habitat and life cycles, making it easier to close off critical habitat to fishers.
“Now we’re at such a better place,” he said.
Fishers’ new woes
There is a caveat to the industry’s good news, Kauer said. Fishing quotas have increased, but demand has not kept pace. “We have seen a ton of rebounding and conservation success in this fishery; we have not seen the economic success,” she said.
Pressure to reduce costs was laid bare during the fishery’s five-year review presented by the Pacific Fisheries Management Council during its annual meeting in November 2025.
The council noted that to adhere to stringent monitoring requirements, fishers must hire expensive human observers or install video monitoring systems that require them to sort slowly and pay for third-party review of their footage. Fishers also pay 3% of the total value of their sold groundfish to NOAA Fisheries for management costs. But the actual price of management is 5.1%, according to the agency, which means Congressional funding is covering the gap.
Fishers from up and down the coast pointed out at the November meeting how these structural costs, coupled with the rising price of diesel and marine insurance, and a loss of profit in important sablefish exports to Japan due to the weakening of the yen against the dollar, are a big expense.
The fishery has taken steps to reduce costs, but fishers say it’s not enough, and the layered requirements rankle. Human observers cost hundreds of dollars a day, so in 2025, the fishery allowed video cameras and sensors to take their place. But installation costs are still in the thousands.
“I understand why we’re doing this, as far as making sure that what is reported is actually caught,” Wade Hearne, a Newport trawl fisher whose family has been catching groundfish for decades, told Mongabay.
But, “It’s ‘1984’ over here,” he said, referring to the strict surveillance model.
Hearne also sends 2.25% of his pay stubs to NOAA Fisheries to pay back the 2002 buyout, plus the additional 3% for data collection and management costs. He’s still making money on groundfish, he said. But without high demand, the small cuts weigh heavily.
In a stated effort to counter underperformance across all U.S. fisheries, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration in April released an executive order asserting that U.S. policy is now to “unburden” fisheries of regulations.
The document highlights the uneven reality of seafood in America. Though U.S. fisheries are among the most sustainable in the world, around 65% of the seafood consumed comes from abroad. (The executive order cites a higher percentage that misleadingly includes fish caught in American waters, sent abroad for processing, and imported back to the U.S.)
The objections simmering in the West Coast groundfish industry have experts wary that key conservation programs could lose their teeth to cost-cutting measures and deregulation.
“As we open things back up, we’re going to have to be real methodical about how it’s done,” said Longton, the Oregon seafood purveyor. “If we go in with the same attitude we did before, you know, it won’t be long before we depress [groundfish numbers] again.”
In March, the Pacific Fisheries Management Council will meet again in California to vote on whether to loosen up the monitoring system.
For now, Kauer said, the West Coast groundfish fishery remains one of the most conservation-focused fisheries systems in the world. That’s not necessarily at odds with economic success, she said.
“If we take good care of the resource, then we will have future profitability from the resource.”
Editor’s note (April 3, 2026): Aaron Longton has passed away.
Banner image: A deckhand watches a groundfish haul aboard the Cassandra Anne, which is based in Oregon, U.S., in 2023. Image by Chris Peterson/Action Works Photography courtesy of Oregon Sea Grant via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
Sweeping cuts and deregulation imperil U.S. fisheries, experts warn
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