Tag Archives: CCG Alfred Needler
DFO trawl surveys – Fishery decisions shored up on flawed science
As unintentional metaphors go, it was strangely apt: a reader with ties to federal fisheries science wrote to me to tell me that a recent column on problems with that science, “only scratched the surface.” In some ways, that seems like a perfect description of the problem. What I’d written about was the use of a contracted private fishing trawler to do a shortened annual fisheries survey on George’s Bank. The vessel was going to do the survey in 11 days – the work normally takes five weeks, and is done by one of two federal fisheries vessels,,, >click to read< 09:17
Strange fish found on the Scotian Shelf
For 25 years Don Clark has been going to the Scotian Shelf to see what’s there. For the last decade the fisheries biologist at the St. Andrews Biological Station in New Brunswick has been in charge of the federal Fisheries and Oceans summer survey. Just after Canada Day each year, the CCG Alfred Needler heads out to trawl 240 way points on the Scotian Shelf between Georges Bank in the south and the Laurentian Channel in the north. It’s an immense area — the 120,000 square kilometres of continental shelf that extends off Nova Scotia’s eastern shore into the North Atlantic. click here to read the story 11:56
