Horan 1

Kendall Horan
Biology of Fishes
15 December 2015
The Radical Rockfish
Up around the Aleutian Islands in Alaska lives a fish with a lifespan more than double
that of a human. The rougheye rockfish (Sebastes aleutianus) lives to be a staggering 205 years
old (Rougheye Rockfish). Though impressive by mortal standards, this species, among its
cousins of the same genus, is hardly special. Rockfish, teleost fish of the family Scorpaenidae
and genus Sebastes, live abnormally long lives. Many of the more than one hundred species
worldwide live to be in the ballpark of one hundred and fifty years old, and even those with the
shortest lifespans reach anywhere from twelve to twenty years, which is not a modest run for a
fish. Apart from being an impressive fact to bring up at parties, the longevity of the rockfish
comes with severe environmental implications, implications of which humans were only recently
aware and able to aid.
Because the rockfish lives to such an advanced age, it matures at a later age than most
fish and experiences low annual rates of reproductive success. Not reaching sexual maturity
until, on average, twenty years of age, rockfish spend about a quarter of their lives unable to
reproduce. In male rockfish, this early life is where the growing happens: by the time a male
rockfish has reached sexual maturity, he is full-grown, so that he may devote all available energy
to enhancing his fecundity, or his capability to produce offspring, through the production and
distribution of sperm. Unlike her male counterpart, the female rockfish continues to grow after
reaching sexual maturity, so that she may bear more offspring. Thats right: the rockfish is
viviparous, meaning it gives birth to live young. A male and female rockfish engage in internal

Horan 2
fertilization, and the female rockfish carries the young within her for just shy of a year before
depositing them, as free-swimming larvae, into crevices within her rocky habitat. From there,
the larvae soon emerge and begin their slow progression to adulthood, reared in nearby kelp beds
by their parents until large enough to go their own way or school in the water column and feed
on something more substantial than plankton. (Love et al. 1990).
Dwelling at depths of anywhere between three and 366 meters and feeding primarily on
the eggs of often larger, more abundant fish, the rockfish exists alongside some of the fishing
industrys most in-demand goods (Williams 2010). This leads to a phenomenon known as
bycatch, or the unintentional harvesting of an untargeted fish. Before restrictions and new
bycatch-resistant fishing methods were put in place in the Northern Pacific, rockfish were
regularly dredged up with a fisherys charged catch. Once inadvertently caught, the rockfish
would be thrown back, whether for a myriad of logistical, political, or managerial reasons, or,
more often, because the rockfish snagged were not of the size sought by the fishery.
Immediately, being brought up and thrown back poses an intense physiological problem
for the rockfish: barotrauma, or pressure shock. Rockfish possess gas bladders, which provide a
means for altering buoyancy and controlling movement through the water columns vertical
plane. However, being rapidly hauled up from its typically benthic, or sea-bottom, habitat, does
not allow the rockfishs gas bladder the time it needs to deflate, resulting in a detrimental
pressure increase on the inside of the fish. Provided the fish survives the initial strain of
barotrauma, its swollen gas bladder prevents it from returning to its benthic habitat upon being
thrown back. This means the inflated fish is stuck floating on the oceans surface, disoriented,
exposed to the open air, and a prime target for predators. When a fishing vessel would haul up

Horan 3
hundreds on thousands of undesired rockfish annually, these fish would be thrown back not to
return to their long life in the sea, but to die.
Long term, on a species-wide scale, these deadly toss-backs posed additional problems
for the rockfish: species degradation. As mentioned, many of the rockfish caught as a product of
bycatch were, in the time before regulations, thrown back due to their insignificant size. Though
some species of rockfish can grow up to three feet in length, this maximum size does not occur
until, or until after, the rockfish reaches sexual maturity (Love et al. 1990). So, many of those
rockfish caught as products of bycatch had not yet reached sexual maturity, which means they
had not yet reproduced, and, when killed, were robbed of any opportunity. Naturally, this led to
a massive decline in the rockfish population, and resulted in trends characteristic of overfishing,
though the rockfish was never a primary target of the fisheries.
Since recognizing the decline of the rockfish population due to overfishing exacerbated
by the bycatch phenomenon, fisheries in the Northern Pacific have made pains to reverse the
damage done to the rockfish. Several species of rockfish were protected under the Endangered
Species Act, fisheries were regulated and monitored, and new techniques were developed to both
avoid bycatch and aid the return of unintentionally caught rockfish and their sensitive gas
bladders to the ocean (Williams 2010). Today, the rockfish have made a notable recovery. Over
one hundred species still exist worldwide despite an endangerment scare, and around twenty to
thirty of those species reside in the Pacific Northwest and Puget Sound areas (Rockfish).
Some of these species even thrive, and have been reopened to the fisheries as industrial targets to
be harvested as goods and, in good faith, put on menus around the globe. However, some
species of rockfish remain critically endangered, and the rebound of the rockfish is by no means
a permanent fix. Because rockfish live such long lives and take such a long time to reach sexual

Horan 4
maturity, they fail to replenish their population at the rate our human population would like to
exploit them, and are therefore poorly suited to support fisheries or act in any capacity as a
species of sustainable goods.
The reproductive rate of the rockfish population is no match for the appetite of the human
population, its true, but that doesnt mean they are of no interest to us. Rockfish, if left to their
own devices, reach ages humans only reach in far-flung science fiction stories. The potential for
the rockfish to show us the secret to longevity is there, we need only show them respect and a
little patience.

Works Cited
Bland, Alastair. For Rockfish, A Tale Of Recovery, Hidden On Menus. NPR. N.p., 6 Feb.
2015. Web.
Bloeser, Jennifer A. Diminishing Returns: The Status of West Coast Rockfish. Pacific Marine
Conservation Council 1999 (1999): 1-94. Hopkins Marine Station Library. Web.
Cailliet, G. M., A. H. Andrews, E. J. Burton, D. L. Watters, D. E. Kline, and L. A. Ferry-Graham.
"Age Determination and Validation Studies of Marine Fishes: Do Deep-dwellers Live
Longer?" Experimental Gerontology April 36.4-6 (2001): 739-64. Science Direct. Web.
Love, Milton S., Pamella Morris, Merritt McCrae, and Robson Collins. Life History Aspects of
19 Rockfish Species (Scorpaenidae: Sebastes) from the Southern California Bight.
NOAA Technical Report NMFS 87 (1990): 1-38. U.S. Department of Commerce. Web.
Rockfish. Encyclopedia of Puget Sound. University of Washington, n.d. Web.
Rougheye Rockfish. Alaska Fisheries Science Center. NOAA, n.d. Web.
Sea Grant. Bring That Rockfish Down. N.p.: Sea Grant, n.d. Westcoast Fisheries. NOAA. Web.
Welch, Craig. 3 Species of Puget Sound Rockfish Listed for Protection. Seattle Times. N.p., 27
Apr. 2010. Web.
Williams, Gregory D., Phillip S. Levin, and Wayne A. Palsson. Rockfish in Puget Sound: An
Ecological History of Exploitation. Marine Policy 34.5 (2010): 1010-020. Science
Direct. DOI: 10.1016/j.marpol.2010.02.008