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UNTIL THE 1980s, when it was recruited as a replacement for declining flounder, the orange roughy was called the slimehead. It seemed abundant in deep water off New Zealand. Arriving in the markets of the northern hemisphere, it quickly became a seafood hit, valued for its mild white flesh. Wal-Mart and other big discount operators promoted it, and exports to this hemisphere soared. Meanwhile, scientists learned that this deepsea predator can live up to 100 years and does not mature sexually until age 25. By the time New Zealand adopted strict catch limits, 80 percent of the roughy population had been destroyed. Large factory trawlers now exploit another virgin roughy stock, in the southeast Atlantic Ocean. As a result, roughy is still abundant in the frozen food lockers of Wal-Mart stores, at least for the time being.
THE OPAH, or moonfish, has an oval-shaped silvery body with crimson fins. Until the 1980s, when tuna fishermen off Hawaii noticed it in their longlines, they dismissed it as "bycatch." Today, 60,000 pounds of opah a year are air-freighted from Hawaii to gourmet markets in California and upscale eateries on the eastern seaboard. With its large rounded profile, this fish provides four types of tasty cuts: the back, the belly, the cheeks, and the breast. Seafood managers don grass skirts and aloha shirts to help promote salmon-colored opah steaks at $12 a pound. Little is known of the opah's life history and relative abundance.
THE PATAGONIAN toothfish, inhabitant of oceanic trenches off Chile and Agentina, has the same firm full-flavored flesh that makes white seabass so popular. As seabass stocks began to be depleted, the toothfish - renamed "Chilean sea bass" - appeared in seafood markets throughout the United States and in Europe. Argentina recently declared a large no-take fishing zone to help protect this species. Meanwhile, the California Department of Fish and Game, with volunteer help from sport fishermen, is now attempting to revive the white seabass population by raising and releasing hatchery-spawned juveniles.
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