Tag Archives: Dr. George Rose
Northern cod numbers may have moved out of critical zone, says federal scientist
Captain Alex Saunders has more experience fishing northern cod than most fishermen. At 81 years old, the fishing captain has fished for cod off the Labrador coast for six decades. This year, he says, was a banner year for that fishery. “There were no codfish in northern Labrador for about 60 years, but this summer the cod were all along the Labrador coast from Blanc Sablan in the south to north of Nain,” Mr. Saunders says. A good catch rate this season meant Mr. Saunders’s crew hauled in 
gillnets every day for weeks, returning to communities such as Pinsent’s Arm, a fishing town of about 50 people along the Labrador coast, to land cod at the wharf. But the season’s quick success also meant its early closing. “On a Friday afternoon they said, ‘Get your gear out of the water Sunday by six o’clock,’” Mr. Saunders says of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ (DFO) decision to shut down the fall northern cod stewardship fishery weeks earlier than planned – a measure to ensure fishing did not exceed season limits. Photos, >>click to read<< 08:33
An interesting post on Cod – ‘Are they still fishing this?’ by Edward Stern
Are they still fishing this?’ replied Dr. George Rose in an email earlier this year. I had written to Rose asking about cod length at first spawning, or the typical size of cod when they are sexually mature. Growth of this species, Gadus morhua, is regulated within a general range by where the fish lives. For a number or reasons, cod around Newfoundland are typically larger than cod in the Baltic. Rose is well aware of these differences. Despite the understood differences in cod growth, Rose balked at the most recent assessment data on eastern Baltic cod which indicates that 50% of the cod are sexually mature enough to spawn at 20-centimetres in length. ‘20 cm maturity is way less than anything ever observed over this way. Although I do not know all the details the [eastern Baltic] stock appears to be in hard shape. Are they still fishing this?’ Fast forward to just a few months ago when the International Council for Exploration of the Seas (ICES) released their formal advice for the Baltic cod stocks in 2017. Read the article here 07:33
The great northern cod comeback
This research, led by Dr. George Rose, tracks what is arguably the most important comeback of any fish stock worldwide. Studying the great northern Atlantic cod stock complex off Newfoundland and Labrador, once considered among the largest cod stocks in the world before its disastrous decline in the 1990s, Dr. Rose documents the stock’s rebound over the past decade from tens of thousands to several hundred thousand tonnes and growing. According to the study, this comeback from commercial extinction has followed three distinct steps: Read the rest here 07:58
Fisheries Acoustic Survey Newfoundland-Blog No 9-of Cod and Second Chances
Thanks to funding from the Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture (DFA) and the Research and Development Corporation (RDC) of Newfoundland and Labrador, this is the fifth consecutive year that CFER scientists, led by , have conducted offshore research aboard the RV Celtic Explorer. Although these trips have supported several projects, the focus has been an annual acoustic-trawl survey of the spawning ‘northern’ cod stock that ranges from southern Labrador to northern Grand Bank. Read the rest here 12:07
Canadian Cod: The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I write this in response to some recent comments by a fisheries research scientist, Dr. George Rose, about the status of Northern Cod. Specifically, he said that we are a decade or so away from anything that would be a recovery. Let’s turn the clock back to the mid-1980s. Inshore fish harvesters were telling fisheries scientists and managers and politicians that all was not well with the Northern Cod stock. Large cod were disappearing, historical migrations patterns,,, Read the rest here 09:23
