Assessment of the shortraker rockfish stock in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands BSAI Chapter 15

Shortraker rockfish (Sebastes borealis) are distributed along the continental slope in the north Pacific from Point Conception in southern California to Japan, and are commonly found between eastern Kamchatka and British Columbia (Love et al. 2002). As adults the species occurs in a narrow range of depths on the continental slope centered at ~350 m (Rooper 2008) often in areas of steep slope (Rooper and Martin 2012). Love et al. (2002) indicates the species is found at shallower depths during early life history. In bottom trawl survey data, the species is most common through the Aleutian Islands (AI) and northern Gulf of Alaska (GOA). In the Bering Sea they are found on the slope survey but not on the shelf survey.