After being beaten down by overfishing to a fraction of the mighty force it once was, northern cod are starting to rebuild and re-populate its traditional areas off the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador. That’s good news for a species that has shown few positive signs of recovery during the 22 years since being placed under a moratorium. Read more here 09:04
NILS STOLPE: The New England groundfish debacle (Part IV): Is cutting back harvest really the answer?
While it’s a fact that’s hardly ever acknowledged, the assumption in fisheries management is that if the population of a stock of fish isn’t at some arbitrary level, it’s because of too much fishing. Hence the term “overfished.” Hence the mandated knee jerk reaction of the fisheries managers to not enough fish; cut back on fishing. What of other factors? They don’t count. It’s all about fishing, because fishing is all that the managers can control; it’s their Maslow’s Hammer. When it comes to the oceans it seems as if it’s about all that the industry connected mega-foundations that support the anti-fishing ENGOs with hundreds of millions of dollars a year in “donations” are interested in controlling. Read the article here
From the article: “Because that area, only three years ago, was absolutely loaded with shrimp and that’s where a lot of the commercial boats were. There were no cod there. Now we go back three years later and the whole situation has changed. There are very few shrimp there and juvenile cod, small codfish — these are two and three years old — are numerous. So, we’ve seen a complete change in that ecosystem in only three years. So that’s going to have major, major implications for all of our fisheries down the line.”
It was only three years ago, Bill Karp said something was not right in our ocean off the coast of New England, they just didn’t know what.
These fish did not just recover up there. They migrated there from the cods southern range.
When will the experts figure this out?