December 9, 2025 — The following was released by the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council:
On the first day of its 158th meeting, the Scientific and Statistical Committee (SSC) of the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council reviewed the best available science on the potential benefits and costs of restoring commercial fishing in U.S. Pacific marine national monuments.
A presentation by SSC member Ray Hilborn, University of Washington professor, examined the limited data available from within existing monument closures, new information from recent re-openings and economic performance of U.S. longline vessels before and after closures. The analysis compared widely promoted claims that large marine protected areas (MPAs) increase biodiversity, create healthier ecosystems and support sustainable fisheries with empirical evidence from the Pacific.
The presentation highlighted that:
- There is very little direct fishery or ecosystem data from inside the closed areas, with most insights coming from catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE) near monument boundaries, acoustic data from drifting fish aggregating devices and economic studies.
- For the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, modeled increases in tuna abundance through spillover were modest (on the order of a few percent), and may not translate into large fishery gains.
- In U.S. monument waters, where historical fishing pressure was relatively low, large ecological responses to closure are not expected, and recent studies have found no measurable increase in tuna biomass density inside open-ocean MPAs and, in some cases, substantial reductions in bigeye CPUE linked to the loss of historically productive grounds.
- Closures of marine national monuments create an illusion of “protection” while leaving non-fishing threats ignored.
Hilborn’s talk also outlined potential SSC platforms for discussion, including that well-regulated U.S. fisheries under the Magnuson–Stevens Act (MSA) are unlikely to pose an abatable threat to pelagic stocks that can be solved through large open-ocean MPAs alone, and that management frameworks such as the MSA and the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission already provide tools to achieve conservation goals while considering human and community impacts.
Eric Kingma, executive director of the Hawaii Longline Association, provided public comment following the SSC discussion. He noted that existing monument area closures “exclude U.S. vessels from U.S. waters and leave us very constrained in where we can fish.” Citing declining bigeye catch rates, Kingma emphasized that “we need to be able to find and follow the fish – that’s the most important part.”
“We’re not looking for more fish, but to have the opportunity to fish more efficiently away from competitors,” Kingma said.