Jack mackerel were in deep trouble 20 years ago. Off the coast of Chile, where the mackerel congregate in one of two Southeast Pacific populations, fishermen caught millions of tons throughout the 1990s, peaking near 5 million tons in 1995.
“That was a lot of fish,” said James Ianelli, a biologist with the United States National Marine Fisheries Service, or NOAA Fisheries. By the mid to late-2000s, the stocks were badly overfished and headed for collapse. For fisheries scientists, jack mackerel had become a symbol of plundered oceans.
But that was then. In the intervening years, a radical change in fishery management, both in Chile and internationally, brought the mackerel back. Today, these fish represent the power of smart science and policy to get a population back on its feet, or rather, its fins...