January 20, 2026 — If no one catches fish in the ocean, are they still there? Commercial fishermen say yes, but fisheries science has been saying otherwise.
The disconnect between what fishermen experience on the water and the information regulators use to manage stocks has always been a bugaboo, but it’s a particular problem when it comes to monkfish.
Since scientists can’t age monkfish, they tie the total allowable landings to an incomplete federal survey and fishermen’s landings over the last few years – which plummeted during COVID when the markets shut down.
When fishermen began targeting the ugly, yet delicious, big-mouthed fish again, they were faced with drastic cuts because the stock assessment model assumed there were less fish because landings were down.
Seeing the problem, Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance teamed up with School for Marine Science and Technology at UMass Dartmouth and commercial fishermen to use a competitive federal grant program to better incorporate fishermen’s effort into the stock assessment.
“Our goal for this project was to provide a way to expand the the stock assessment model to include fishing effort,” said Melissa Sanderson, chief operating office at Fishermen’s Alliance, who noted that local gillnet fishermen have told her that they are less likely to target monkfish when prices are low or when the skates clog up the nets excluding the monks. “Because monkfish landings are low, the amount fishermen are allowed to harvest keeps going down.”