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Something similar happened to the cod fishing industry in Newfoundland and other parts of eastern Canada 30 years ago. The reason: overfishing, due in large par
by ilamont 4y ago
Something similar happened to the cod fishing industry in Newfoundland and other parts of eastern Canada 30 years ago. The reason: overfishing, due in large part to technological advances. Here's what happened:
Canada and NAFO continued to overestimate the abundance of cod in the Atlantic Ocean and therefore continued to set dangerously high [Total Allowable Catches]. This was in large part due to the widespread practice of calculating cod populations from catch rates in the commercial fishery – if fishers filled their quotas with ease, then officials believed the stock size was at adequately high levels. However, fishing technology had become so efficient by the 1970s that commercial catch rates remained high even as the cod population dropped to dangerously low levels. Electronic tracking devices could find fish no matter how small their numbers and trawlers could harvest most species with relative ease. ...
Although overfishing in international waters did tremendous damage to northern cod, Canada also failed to maintain a sustainable fishery within its 200-mile limit. The government ignored warnings from inshore fishers and university scientists that cod stocks were in danger and chose to maintain quotas instead of scaling back the fishery, in large part to prevent economic losses and massive unemployment.
By the early 1990s, after decades of sustained intensive fishing from Canadian and international fleets, the northern cod stocks collapsed. The spawning biomass of northern cod had dropped by about 93 per cent in only 30 years – from 1.6 million tonnes in 1962 to between 72,000 and 110,000 tonnes in 1992. In July of that year, Canada imposed a moratorium on the catching of northern cod and ended an international industry that had endured for close to 500 years.
https://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/economy/moratorium.php https://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/economy/moratorium.php
They called off the season in 1992 and it never came back. A pillar of the local economy in the Maritimes was wrecked.
As for climate change and its impact on East Coast fishing, I've read that lobster fishing is no longer a viable industry in Long Island and it's declining in southern New England as waters get warmer and the lobsters permanently migrate north.
- beefman 4y agoGreat song about it by Finest Kind (sadly not properly available online): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX6dJgmof0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX6dJgmof0E
- uxp100 4y agoInteresting what is and isn’t available. Because I clicked this link to see not recognizing the name Finest Kind and was like, oh they play that on the folk program pretty often, I know that song.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- starik36 4y agoLooks like this article was written in 2008. I wonder if the population has rebounded in the last 15 years at all.
- PuppyTailWags 4y agoWikipedia says its not expected to recover to sustainable levels until 2030. Mind that they take 2-8 years to reach sexual maturity and were reduced to 1% of original population level, so a span of decades to recover is pretty sadly expected.
- tromp 4y ago> to prevent economic losses and massive unemployment So sad to see how easily long term catastrophic damage is justified by short term gains.
- Tozen 4y agoIf the world doesn't get over fossil fuel addiction and allowing oil companies to push us to near extinction for their profits, really soon, the worse is yet to come.
- mysterydip 4y agoAs much as I would like to end such an addiction, there aren't even viable replacements for every ICE yet. What do we do about aircraft, freight trucks, and sea vessels?
- zachrose 4y agoStop using them so much?
- scottLobster 4y agoYeah, how about we shut down large swaths of national economies. That's produced nothing but positive effects for all involved over the last couple of years.
- chiefalchemist 4y agoKeep in mind, there are a (relatively) small number of ecomonies and peoples causing the majority of the damage / side effects. The others can continue as they have been. The current model isn't sustainable. Something *must* change. There can be no actual change without change. The point is, the economies in question (i.e., the over-contributors) need to change and all we're talking about is getting back to normal. In what reality is a normal that's so deadly so normalized and worshipped?
- jjr8 4y agoClimate change (warming waters) has been directly implicated in this (edit: Gulf of Maine cod) situation. https://doi.org/10.1126%2Fscience.aac9819 https://doi.org/10.1126%2Fscience.aac9819
- dfc 4y agoHow is a 90% decrease in two years similar to a 93% decrease over 30 years?
- llbeansandrice 4y agoTop 2 comments are like "oh yeah this is over fishing" when the only thing in common with cod are that they're in the ocean. Either folks aren't RTFA or are being willfully ignorant. Over fishing to the tune 1bn crabs when juvenile populations from 2018 and 2019 looked great? No way.
- abudabi123 4y agoTw current threats to the foodweb in the ocean are microplastics and wastewater release from Fukushima nuclear reactor area.
- kergonath 4y agoDo you have any idea of the quantity of radionuclides released from Fukushima and their half lives? Just a couple of kilometres off the coast of Japan their activity is well below (multiple orders of magnitude) the natural background level. The sea is naturally full of radioactive potassium and uranium, amongst a lot of others.
- mickdeek86 4y agoI work in the Alaska fishery and am typing this while sat in one of the largest fish processing facilities in the western hemisphere. I have the spare time because, well, there's no crabs coming in and everything else is mostly out of season. About half of the boats on Discovery belong to the company I work for, the largest in the US. So I'll take the opportunity to share some on-the-ground observations. Overfishing: It's not this. A billion crabs is north of 5 billion pounds, in other words on the order of 100x the US crabbing fleet's capability. I would hazard to guess there isn't enough crabbing gear on the planet earth to have achieved that catch. Foreign fleets: If this is the case, the real bad news is that the Rusky's and/or Chinese have developed cloaking device technology. Trawling: We're talking about the bottom-scrapers. They're new on the scene relative to the crabbers. Alaska allows 4 1/3 million crabs as bycatch (waste), amounting to ~20 million pounds, which would be a decent annual catch. Even though this is thought to interfere specifically with breeding grounds, it isn't enough to have caused this depopulation event. It's more than enough to piss of the crabbers though, since it actually is unfair. Disease: Is there a precedent in Earth's natural history of a 90% die-off in two years due to disease? We might have to go back to the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. Which brings us to: Climate change: There was a similar depopulation event in the early 80s. 1980 still holds the annual catch record at 200 million pounds (~40 million animals), a sustained harvest without noticeable impact on the stock. The waters warmed, population (and yield) suddenly tanked on a similar scale, and never recovered to anywhere near those levels. The basic ecological dynamic of a fishery is this: deep, cold, nutrient-rich waters are pushed by a current into a steep continental shelf, forcing them toward the surface where it fertilizes plankton, the foundation of sea life. The volcanic Aleutian archipelago is such a place, another notable one is Peru's fishery. A change in sea temperature can effect this dynamic, in addition to the breeding and general survival of crabs. However long it takes for the stock to recover (probably a long time, even if the environmental conditions do return to favorable), one outcome is almost a foregone conclusion: independent crabbers will have be forced out, and only the larger companies, with deeper pockets and more diversified across fish species, will survive, leading to another round of conglomeration.
- sdenton4 4y agoAny chance that trawling caused significant decline due to habitat damage, regardless of actual by catch tonnage?