The United States’ seafood industry declined precipitously in the months following the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, and research shows that targeted federal assistance will be necessary to bring it back.

UC Santa Barbara aquaculture and fisheries professor Halley Froehlich and colleagues suspected as much early on in the pandemic, but for something as large and complex as the seafood industry, the trends were not so obvious. As a result, financial assistance in that direction has been slow.