January 16, 2020 — Studies on global fisheries rarely make national news, but University of Washington professor of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences Ray Hilborn says that the public perception of fisheries is still recovering from one eye-catching study in 2006.
“A paper come out that said if current trends continue, all fish stocks will be collapsed by 2048, and that got front page New York Times, front page Washington Post, and it was totally wrong,” Hilborn said. “It was so contrary to my experience and lots of people, you can imagine almost everyone working on fisheries in Alaska. Ultimately I got together with the first author of the paper and we figured we could actually try to understand why we had such different perspectives.”
The result of the collaboration was a paper published in 2009 which showed that on average, stock abundance appeared to be stable.
“What they had assumed is that if that catch goes down, the catch is declining, and that simply wasn’t true. Most of the stocks they called collapsed, the catch had declined for other reason. Many times regulation, some times international 200 mile zones,” Hilborn said.
Hilborn worked to build a data set on the abundance of fish stocks, rather than just the reported catch.
More than a decade later, Hilborn’s research shows how intensely managing fisheries has resulted in increased abundance of fish stocks.