Fish stocks: counting the uncountable?

For decades, fisheries scientists have warned that many fish stocks are being fished too hard. Sometimes the advice has been followed; other times it has not, and entire fisheries have collapsed – as happened with the herring fishery in the North Sea in the late 1970s and the cod fisheries in the Grand Banks and Kattegat in the early 2000s. Fortunately, reduced fishing in recent years has allowed many fish stocks to begin to rebuild.

When scientists make predictions about the fate of fish stocks, questions arise about how they arrived at their figures and where the data come from. In this leaflet, we explain how fish stocks are assessed in the Northeast Atlantic and give insight into the types of science and information that goes into scientists’ stock estimates.