Overview of Management Actions Taken by the Pacific Fishery Management Council to Account for and Minimize Bycatch of Groundfish

Regulatory efforts to reduce bycatch fulfill multiple management goals -from protecting overfished and depleted species, to preventing over-harvest of species of unknown abundance, to acknowledging that vessels using different gear types require different harvest strategies, to matching within-year harvest rates to within-year abundance and congregation habits of managed species. These goals must be balanced with the mandate to achieve the optimum yield (OY) from the fishery as a whole, over time. For a multi-species fishery, the catching of species other than the particularly targeted species is not necessarily a problem. Discard of non-targeted species, whether for economic or regulatory reasons, is a problem, and one the Council has worked to reduce through ongoing changes to the management system.