Long before industrialized fishing ravaged the oceans, the Pacific halibut had already been pummeled by overzealous harvesting. "1888 was the first commercial delivery of halibut," says Gregg Williams, senior biologist for the International Pacific Halibut Commission. "They quickly overfished it into the 1920s. There wasn't any left."

But, in contrast to its Atlantic cousins, it has been carefully brought back to fishable levels through tough regulation. A treaty between Canada and the U.S. set up the International Pacific Halibut Commission in 1923 to conduct scientific research on halibut stocks in the area and set limits on how much Pacific halibut can be fished by either country every year. Today, "The commercial quota is at an almost historic high level. The basic message is: We've got a lot of halibut in the water," says Williams.

Even in this fishery, the problem of bycatch hasn't been solved, however. Bycatch accounts for 12 to 13 percent of the halibut that are slaughtered each year, says Williams. That's a huge percentage, compared to the 2, 3 and 4 percent bycatch that other fish like salmon and crab suffer.

But the Pacific halibut fishery can handle the level of bycatch because the total halibut capture is controlled. In other fisheries the rules are much more lax, because "the fishermen write the regulations for themselves," says Newkirk.

The international cooperation between Canada and the U.S. is a key factor, say conservationists, in understanding why the North Pacific Halibut fishery has been successful -- and it could offer a road map for larger-scale operations aimed at dealing with overfishing on the deep seas. Any hope of restoring those fish populations will require major international cooperation among the very countries, such as Japan and Russia, now competing for the free-for-the-taking wealth of the sea.

Historically, nations have competed to strip-mine the ocean of its fish, rather than cooperate to preserve them. "There really are no international management regimes for anything other than tuna," says George Leonard, marine science coordinator for the Monterey Bay Aquarium. "They've been working for years in the Atlantic on bluefin tuna, and it continues to be overfished."

As the problem of overfishing, both in the deep seas and closer to home, becomes more and more apparent, the U.S.'s regional fisheries council system is coming under new scrutiny. On Wednesday, the Pew Oceans Commission released its recommendations for how the U.S. should overhaul its oceans policies. The hard-hitting report argues that "the crisis in marine fishery management is a crisis in governance," and charges that the regional council system lets "commercial interests drive management decisions." The commission calls for the creation of a new national oceans agency that would reform the council system to operate with a true conservation mandate.

Already, fishing groups are trying to discredit the commission as too heavily weighted toward environmental concerns. But a congressionally chartered, more conservative group, the United States Commission on Ocean Policy, is also reviewing how the country manages its waters. That group's recommendations are expected in late summer. Conservationists hope that any recommendation that both commissions make will be hard for Congress to ignore.

But they don't expect a large-scale crackdown on a self-regulated industry with the Bush administration leading the charge. "With this Congress and this president, I cannot imagine it," concedes Sarah Newkirk from the Stanford Fisheries Policy Project.

It's hard to get the public -- and therefore Congress -- excited about the disappearance of creatures they don't usually see except on their dinner plates. Unlike an old-growth redwood forest clear-cut for timber, the ocean's waters conceal what's been taken from it. Plus, those freaks-of-nature fish, like the enormous Atlantic and Pacific halibut, with two eyes googling out from one side of their heads, don't exactly inspire gut-level mammalian sympathy.

"People connect with the ocean in a very limited way; they go to the beach," says Doug Hopkins from Environmental Defense. "If there is still sand there, and shells washed up on the beach, and they don't find oil slicks or needles lying around, it looks OK." For any real change to come in how we think of harvesting fish, "It's going to take the public perceiving greater ownership than the public seems to perceive now."

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