Fishery closures can help protect species from becoming overfished as well as enabling species to recover from overfishing.
A good example of how fishery closures have helped rebuild some stocks of orange roughy to a point where they once again can be sustainably commercially fished.
Orange roughy became popular when stocks were first found by trawlers in overseas fisheries during the late 1970s and the fish’s popularity exploded. Fishing for orange roughy in Australia began in the mid 1980s.
Orange roughy are deep ocean fish and grow and mature relatively slowly. They start reproducing when they are about 25 years old and can live to be over 100. Because they gather in large schools, fishers could easily haul in big catches using trawl nets.
Unfortunately, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, large harvests meant more roughy were being taken out of the stock than was being replaced by reproduction. As a result stocks in eastern Australia declined over the next decade.
These stock declines of orange roughy led the Australian Fisheries Management Authority (AFMA) to reduce total allowable catches and then implement the Orange Roughy Conservation Program. This imposed strict rules on orange roughy fishing, including banning targeted orange roughy fishing and closures of waters where orange roughy occur, i.e. waters deeper than 700 metres.
Today, through successful science-based fisheries management, including industry surveys, closures and very low catches, the eastern orange roughy stocks have rebuilt to a healthy level where they can be commercially fished for the first time in 10 years.
A very conservative total allowable catch was set for the 2015-16 season which allows some commercial fishing while enabling the stocks to continue to rebuild.
Read more about orange roughy