Today, there is no commercial sale of Atlantic halibut in the U.S., and there's only a small amount available in Canada, says David Nemerson, a conservation biologist at the National Aquarium in Baltimore. And it's still fished recreationally in the United States. But just because Atlantic halibut are no longer being commercially fished doesn't mean that the fish will magically rebound. For one thing, large fish come back slowly, if at all.

"[The Atlantic halibut] is a very large fish that used to grow to over 700 pounds," says Nemerson. But like many very large fish, "They grow slowly, mature late in life and have relatively few numbers of offspring, so they don't tend to bounce back from overfishing."

But that's not the Atlantic halibut's biggest problem. There's also the danger of getting caught in the wrong net. Because the few Atlantic halibut that remain feed on and swim with other sea creatures that are still profitable, such as cod and scallops, they are often killed as "bycatch" when those fish are harvested. "Bycatch" is the industry euphemism for the fish that accidentally die in the nets and on the line when another species is caught. For Atlantic halibut, that means being scooped up by bottom-trawlers cruising for scallops and cod.

Some 25 percent of what fishermen catch around the world is thrown out as bycatch, according to "America's Living Oceans: Charting a Course for Sea Change," a new study released Wednesday by the Pew Oceans Commission, a consortium of scientists, conservationists and some fishermen. The commission calculated that 2.3 billion pounds of marine wildlife were thrown back -- injured or dead -- in U.S. waters in the year 2000 alone.

Unfortunately, the plight of the Atlantic halibut hasn't led to any organized rescue attempt on the part of fishery regulators.

"We don't protect Atlantic halibut even though it is commercially extinct, and very near biological extinction," says the Ocean Conservancy's Powell. The attitude of fishery regulators, says Powell, is "'if I don't see it brought to market, then it doesn't exist.'"

If there ever was an industry that gives the lie to the free-market fantasy that the best regulators of an industry are that industry itself, it would seem to be the commercial fishing world. After more than 25 years of self-regulation, almost one-third of all American fish species are considered overfished by conservationists.

Most fish conservation specialists point the finger at the regulators. In the United States, fishery managers concentrate on those species that can still yield a profit. That's because the appointees to the eight regional fishery management councils that set much of fishing policy in the U.S. are dominated by commercial fishing interests.

Even sports fishermen grumble that the rules that govern them are made by the big-money, industrial fishing guys: "It appears to be a regulated industry, but it's pretty darn unregulated. It's the wolf watching the henhouse," says Gregg Parsley, an Alaska charter boat captain, who takes recreational fishermen out searching for halibut.

Doug Hopkins, an attorney with the conservation group Environmental Defense, sits on the New England Fishery Management Council. He's the one and only representative from a conservation or environmental group on any of the eight regional councils. "Fishing is not a very big piece of the economy," he says. "It just happens to be one that's been able to call its own shots politically, essentially forever."

The eight regional councils were formed in the mid-'70s as part of a patriotic act to protect the interests of U.S. fishermen. "In 1976, foreign fishermen dominated American waters," explains Sarah Newkirk, an attorney and a research fellow at the Stanford Fisheries Policy Project.

In 1976, an Act of Congress established a 200-mile "exclusive economic zone" around the coastline of the United States, effectively banning fishermen from other countries from America's coastal waters. At the same time, it created a council system that let fishermen help set the limits on what they could catch, assuming that they'd take the long view and prevent overfishing. That hasn't happened. "The regulatory structure that they put together was probably just an afterthought," Newkirk says. "The fishermen dominate the appointed members of the council, which creates an inherent conflict of interest."

Take New England, where the influence over the council by fishing interests means that the "total allowable catch" that the council sets for cod each year is a "soft" number. There are no quotas. The fishery is not even closed for the year when the annual limit has been taken out of the water.

The "total allowable catch" is just a target, which means that the target has been exceeded for the last seven years. "In the Gulf of Maine, we've had an overrun total target of anywhere from 140 percent to 200 percent plus," says Hopkins, who serves on the New England Fishery Management Council. "Which means that it doesn't mean anything."

Which brings us to the Pacific halibut fishery. Even the most doom-and-gloom conservationists have high praise for it. "People love it because it's really science-driven," says Wing from the Natural Resources Defense Council. "We're going to figure out how many fish we can afford to catch, and we're not going to allow anyone to catch more than that."

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council has to adhere to limits set by the International Pacific Halibut Commission, which governs the catch of Pacific halibut by American and Canadian fishermen. It's hardly a worldwide coalition, but it's an international effort that's had good results for decades simply by conducting scientific assessments of how many halibut are available, and sticking to the limits that fisheries biologists set -- instead of the fishing industry setting its own targets, and carelessly exceeding them at will.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council has to adhere to the catch limits that the International Pacific Halibut Commission hands down. It achieves that by setting strict quotas on how much halibut each commercial operator can catch a year, during the halibut season. The Department of Commerce, which oversees all the regional fishery councils, is now considering a similar quota system for recreational charter boats that fish for halibut in Pacific waters. That would make one of the most tightly regulated fisheries in the country even tougher.

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