November 24, 2025 — Over the past decade, it’s become more difficult for commercial halibut fishermen off Alaska’s coasts to catch enough to meet their quotas, as the flat whitefish have become less abundant and smaller.
That’s according to a recent series of stories from fisheries reporter Hal Bernton, published in the Anchorage Daily News, Seattle Times and Northern Journal.
Bernton says the potential reasons for the decline include a warmer ocean leading to less food for young halibut, as well as a flawed model used for managing the fishery.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Hal Bernton: While the resource was in a cyclical decline, the models that the International Pacific Halibut Commission were using to basically estimate how many fish are out there and what’s the future, they were significantly flawed. And there was one scientist who was very outspoken about flaws in the model, and it wasn’t well received, and he ended up getting fired. Then they developed new models that really bore out some of the criticism that he made. So there’s a mix of environmental conditions, and then some would say, also, there have been some fishing pressures as well that have contributed to the decline.
Casey Grove: So for commercial halibut fishing, the folks that you talked to, they’re doing longlining, so they’ve got, you know, hundreds of baited hooks out. But then in some of the same areas, you’ve got folks that are bottom trawlers that are catching fish with nets. And you talked to a captain of one of those boats, who essentially said one of the things that keeps him up at night is catching too many halibut. I wonder if you could explain how that works.