NORTHEAST PACIFIC FLATFISH MANAGEMENT

Exploitation of northeast Pacific flatfish effectively began in the la te 1800s with the fishery for Pacific halibut. Harvest of other flatfi sh occurred on a limited, local basis until foreign fishing fleets cam e to the area in the late 1950s. When US and Canadian fishermen replac ed the foreign fleets in the 1970s and 1980s, a conservation-based man agement system designed to control foreign fishing was applied to the domestic fleet. Flatfish stock assessment is based on scientific surve ys, both trawl and longline, and on catch-age models. In Alaskan water s since 1989 and since 1996 in Canadian waters, mandatory observers co llect data on species composition, discards of flatfish and other grou ndfish, and catch and discards of prohibited species. Fishermen pay ob server costs. Most biomass and harvest occurs in the Bering Sea-Aleuti an Islands area. Many northeast pacific flatfish are near record-high abundance, an order of magnitude higher than 20 years ago. Exploitatio n rates based on F-35% or F-0.1 generate acceptable biological catch o f more than 1 million mt, but annual harvest reaches only 300,000 mt. Total groundfish harvest is limited by an optimum yield limit of 2 mil lion mt in the Bering Sea-Aleutian Islands, where the acceptable biolo gical catch is 3 million mt, and by Limits on amounts of Pacific halib ut and other prohibited species bycatch. Most flatfish are relatively low-value species, and fishermen chose to fish for more valuable speci es. A large, powerful fleet which developed under open access in the U S saw fishing time decline and economic problems increase as catching capacity grew, while Canada stabilized its fleet with limited entry an d catch restrictions for individual vessels. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.