USA (North-East) - Exploitation

Over the past half a century, the component fish stocks have exhibited the classic cycles of excessive effort, stock declines, and iterations thereof until the point of sequential stock depletion (Fogarty and Murawski, 1998; Murawski et al., 1997; Serchuk et al., 1994). In this context, the major fishery-related events in the NEUS over the past several decades can be characterized loosely as the following sequence: an increase in small pelagic catches by foreign fleets, a continued increase in demersal groundfish catches, a precipitous decline in small pelagic stocks, a decline of some groundfish stocks, an effective cessation of the small pelagic fisheries (and expulsion of foreign fleets), a continual series of overfishing on an ever-increasing array of groundfish, an increase in elasmobranch stocks, the beginnings of an increase in small pelagic stocks, an establishment of elasmobranch fisheries, an increase in benthic invertebrate fisheries and stocks, the persistence of groundfish stocks at moderate to low levels, the persistence of groundfish fisheries at suboptimal yields, the decline of elasmobranch stocks and subsequently their fisheries, and the effective explosion of small pelagic stocks to what are now record highs (Serchuk et al., 1994; Murawski and Fogarty, 1998; Link and Brodziak, 2002; Overholtz, 2002).
Currently most demersal stocks are at moderate to low levels, elasmobranch stocks are declining, and small pelagic stocks are at record highs (Serchuk et al., 1994; Fogarty and Murawski, 1998; Link and Brodziak, 2002; Overholtz, 2002). This has all been occurring while an underlying series of regional oceanographic dynamics were changing, characterized particularly by long term warming (Taylor and Bascunan, 2001) and NAO shifts.