Shifting Monkfish

Earlier this year supermarkets removed monkfish from their menus admist concerns about depleted populations. Now, thanks to shifting baselines, monkfish is not overfished after all. According to an article at Seafood.com News published on Friday:

A new monkfish stock assessment has concluded that the resource in both the Northern and Southern Fishery Management Areas is not overfished and overfishing is not occurring. The conclusion completely reverses the scientific community's previous understanding about monkfish, which until now was considered to be overfished and in significant need of rebuilding.

Luckily, the article gives a few indications for how this conclusion was drawn. It's a beautiful indication of shifting baselines but I can't imagine the deep-sea monkfish is pleased. Turns out, the stock assessment was done considering only data from the 1980s onward.

Even though monkfish biomass indices from science center surveys were approximately twice as high before 1980 than after, scientists were not able to use these higher numbers in the new SCALE model. The model "could only be applied to the period from 1980 to the present," said scientists, in large part because landings data prior to 1980, a factor in the equation, were so unreliable.

Scientists furthermore expressed concern that the median and maximum sizes of monkfish in both the north and south have declined since the 1980s.

New England council member Mark Gibson of Rhode Island was totally taken aback by the assessment. He seriously challenged the decision to run the assessment using a time series that began in 1980 instead of back in the 1960s.

Many people seemed to be pleased about the monkfish assessment (including those interested in catching monkfish), the question about the ever-shifting baseline was not raised. Using this new data, monkfish are not overfished. Maybe to solve the overfishing dilemma, we should simply use biomass numbers beginning in 2005 and our fish will be fine.