About Lyall Bellquist

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With a childhood shared between the hill country of Texas and the beaches of southern California, I developed an early love for nature and the outdoors. Fishing, hunting, diving, and all things outdoors became core elements of my identity from a young age, and remain so today. My passion for understanding the ocean environment in particular fueled my early career interests, inspiring me to earn a B.S. in aquatic biology from the University of California Santa Barbara, M.S. in marine biology from California State University Long Beach, and Ph.D. in marine biology from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. Following my graduate studies, I was a National Research Council postdoctoral fellow at the NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, CA. In 2017, I joined The Nature Conservancy, California Oceans Program, where I worked as a senior fisheries scientist until 2024. I am now working independently in San Diego with a visiting scholar appointment at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.   

My research goal is to integrate collaborative and quantitative fisheries science; knowledge, expertise, and participation from fishing communities; and management needs of state and federal natural resource agencies, ultimately to enable robust, data-driven management decisions for sustainable fisheries. My recent research has focused on commercial and recreational fisheries dynamics, impacts to west coast marine ecosystems from marine heatwaves as a function of climate change, data-limited fisheries science and management tools, and commercial fisheries bycatch reduction. This includes several specific projects, such as identifying management options for reducing whale entanglements in the California commercial Dungeness Crab fishery, testing experimental deep-set buoy gear for reducing bycatch in the California commercial swordfish fishery, understanding Silky Shark stock structure in the tropical Eastern Pacific Ocean, evaluating size limits in California recreational fisheries, documenting trends and economic impacts of federally-declared fishery disasters nationwide, documenting nationwide performance of state fisheries management, and performing regional data syntheses to understand marine heatwave impacts to west coast fisheries.

When I'm not working, I'm often in the kitchen, cooking wild game and fish with my amazing wife, or we'll take an early morning hike together, exploring the beaches, islands, deserts, and mountains that southern California has to offer. We also love spending time in her home, Vancouver Island! So you might find me spearfishing for Yellowtail in the La Jolla kelp beds, slow-trolling for Chinook Salmon off Port Renfrew, or hunting in various places across the western US and Canada. I also frequent San Diego's local taco shops - after all, one must respect the street taco! :-)