 Abundances of barndoor skate dropped precipitously in the 1960s and early 1970s, coinciding with the period of intense fishing by foreign factory trawlers.The abundance remained very low through around 1990, but increased nearly exponentially from 1990–2005, and have been approaching the levels observed in the 1960s.In 1998, Casey and Myers  published a controversial study claiming that barndoor skate was nearly extinct.