But fishermen said the true impact of the cuts would go much deeper.

“It’s 80 percent of a really small number to begin with,” Mr. Goethe said. He said the actual loss to the industry would be more like $60 million. “When you get down to cuts that small, there’s simply no place to go,” he said.

Frank Mirarchi, a fisherman from Scituate, Mass., who primarily pursues groundfish, said that the proposed limits would deprive him of his living and that the cuts would ripple up and down the coast.

“This whole economy in this region is a really small microbusiness economy,” Mr. Mirarchi said. “The fuel guy, the ice guy, the guy that drives the fish truck from the landing port to the processing center, fish cutters — a job here, a job there,” he said. “It’s not like closing a big factory. It’s little jobs on nondescript piers that just kind of disappear and nobody notices.”

The limits come after years of what many scientists, managers and fishermen alike have said was mismanagement based on inconsistent or overly optimistic estimates of where fish stocks were, and how they could be rebuilt.

“I think the reality is that our understanding of where the stock is has changed,” Mr. Nies said. “We last assessed these stocks back in 2008 and we thought they were growing quite well, and so the quotas were going up. And then when we assessed them this year, we find out that they in fact have not grown as we expected.”