March 6, 2026 — Aaron Longton reached down into the rinsing sink in his garage-turned-fish-processing facility on the Oregon coast and hoisted a redbanded rockfish by its fat bottom lip. The homely fish was next in line for the dressing table, where Brian Morrissey, Longton’s “cutter-in-chief,” would deftly slice it into neat fillets, setting aside its guts and bones for crabbing chum.
Morrisey had about 250 kilograms (550 pounds) of the rockfish (Sebastes babcocki) to get through that day, and 90 kg (200 lbs) of lingcod (Ophiodon elongatus), he said, his knife unzipping yet another fish. An unthinkable abundance only 20 years ago.
“These fish were really severely limited to us,” said Longton, founder of Port Orford Sustainable Seafood, a company that sells fish via a subscription program. “Now, we have huge quotas.”
The groundfish Longton hauls to his processing room from the pier down the street are the spoils of a painstakingly rebuilt industry. Twenty-six years ago, the West Coast groundfish industry, which encompasses more than 90 species of bottom-dwelling fish off Washington, Oregon and California, had overfished itself to near devastation. In response, fisheries authorities closed vast tracts of the ocean to trawling and slashed fishing quotas, throwing many fishers into painful retirement.
But in the aftermath, an unlikely corps materialized of fishers, scientists, conservationists and government, all intent on rebuilding the fishery with sustainability as a core principle. They jointly innovated fishing quotas, organized a strict program to monitor fishing vessels, modified trawling gear and conducted years of meticulous stocktaking and research.
In October 2025, the program reached a critical milestone. Fishery officials declared yelloweye rockfish (S. ruberrimus) — the last of the 10 groundfish species once overfished to below a quarter of their healthy levels — rebuilt. All groundfish are now at healthy stock levels, years earlier than expected.
“Fisheries on the West Coast are being really, really well-managed,” Waldo Wakefield, an ocean ecology and fishing gear researcher affiliated with Oregon State University, told Mongabay. From 1999-2018, Wakefield was involved in the fishery’s reconstruction as a biologist at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, part of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The West Coast groundfish fishery in particular, he said, “is pretty enlightened.”