The sea was thick with them once; they practically jumped into your boat. Since the time of Columbus we've finished for cod--and now, from Cape Code to Newfoundland, they are fished out.

Twilight of the Cod

New Scientist Magazine, April 1995

Endless resources, free for the taking, are what made America possible, and it started with cod. Cod spurred the settlement of the New World. They were its first industry and export. They fed the Pilgrims. And now, after 500 years, from Georges Bank right up to the Grand, they are all but gone.

During the 1980s the New England council proved itself unwilling to control fishing. Indeed, one of its early actions, in 1982, was to eliminate catch quotas. Its goal, it said, was a simpler system that would allow the fishery to operate in response to its own internal forces. As the decade progressed, the fishery did just that--and as NMFS scientists warned of declining stocks of cod, haddock, and yellowtail flounder, the council dithered. That changed only in 1991, when the NMFS was sued by the Conservation Law Foundation. Under court order, the council began drafting regulations that would require fishermen to reduce their number of days at sea by 10 percent a year for five years--the goal being to cut fishing effort and presumably fishing mortality in half. Fishermen protested: while the council system turns the henhouse over to the foxes, it manages to leave most of the foxes feeling unrepresented. Nevertheless, the new regulations, known as Amendment 5, finally took effect last May.

Three months later the NMFS announced that the regulations would not be nearly enough to save Georges Bank cod--let alone haddock or yellowtail flounder, which had already collapsed. In 1993, the NMFS said, fishermen had caught 55 percent of the cod living on the bank. Only reducing fishing immediately to levels approaching zero could save the stock now. In December the NMFS implemented emergency regulations to close large parts of Georges Bank to all groundfishing while the New England council figured out a long-term solution. Just how long-term was anyone’s guess; the NMFS guess was that it might take decades for the cod stock to recover.

At the meeting in the Peabody Holiday Inn last November, the New England council’s groundfish committee was beginning to pick up the pieces. Among other things, it was arguing about what exactly approaching zero meant--whether at least some cod fishing might not continue. In the audience that day was an NMFS scientist named Andrew Rosenberg. In the early 1990s Rosenberg was the NMFS liaison to the New England council, charged with passing on the scientists’ advice. Now he is on temporary assignment to the Gloucester office, charged with implementing all fishing regulations. It’s come to the point now where unless you’re absolutely blind you can’t pretend that the stock isn’t in very bad shape, because it’s almost gone, says Rosenberg. And still people are arguing ‘We don’t want to have a direct control on how much we catch.’

The dreadful irony of overfishing, as any fisheries scientist will explain, is that if it could somehow be stopped, and fish stocks were allowed to grow, and fishermen fished at a rate that was lower than the stocks’ growth rate, they could catch more fish with less effort. In New England, NMFS economist Steven Edwards and population biologist Steven Murawski have estimated, overfishing costs the economy $150 million a year in lost groundfish. Nationwide that loss has been put at $2 billion. It’s just like interest in a bank account, says Rosenberg. If you’re earning 5 percent interest, and you take 10 percent out every year, what happens to the account? It drops like a stone. If you take 3 percent of the account every year and it’s earning 5 percent, it grows. And eventually 3 percent of a big number is bigger than 10 percent of a very small number.

When it was first discussed, Rosenberg goes on, Amendment 5 probably could have done something for cod. You had some big year classes in the late 1980s that could have helped production. If some protection had come in rapidly at that point, if somebody had said, ‘Hold it, we’ve got something coming through; instead of just fishing it harder, let’s really back off and let that build a new stock for us’--if they had done that, then you would have been in relatively good shape. But by the time Amendment 5 came along, those good year classes were gone. It’s the bank account analogy again. If you’ve got your money in the bank and suddenly you get a little inheritance, you can either blow it all in the first year, or you can hang on to it. After time, 5 percent of the inheritance will be quite a large number, and you’ll be able to use it for a long period. The option chosen here was equivalent to blowing it.

What is to be done? The few cod that are left are doing their best already--still chasing capelin and herring, still stemming the currents on the banks, still ascending by twos from their diminished schools to couple gently in the gray unquiet Atlantic. On Georges Bank, at least, they are responding just as biologists would expect to a predator that is slaughtering them: they are spawning sooner--at age two now instead of three. They are living faster because they are dying younger.

Meanwhile, as their numbers have declined, they have surrendered their dominance on the bank to other species, such as skates and spiny dogfish. These fish are less attractive to consumers (although fishermen are going after them nonetheless), and they prey on young cod. How this will affect the recovery of cod, no one knows. At Memorial University in Newfoundland, biologists are trying to perfect a system for hatching cod, in hopes of boosting the wild stocks. Maybe this will work--but it has been tried repeatedly without success.

American consumers have not suffered much yet from the Atlantic cod crisis; for the moment, the slack is being taken up by Pacific cod, by Norwegian and Russian cod from the Barents Sea, and by similar fish such as pollack, which are now being swept up by factory ships off Alaska. But the U.S. and Canadian governments are having to pay dearly for the irrationality they permitted in their fisheries. The U.S. government has already allocated $60 million to easing the pain of Atlantic fishermen, Canada more than $600 million. If these programs keep too many boats chasing too few fish, they will be counterproductive in the end. In New England there is much talk of paying fishermen not to fish, as some farmers are paid not to farm. The idea is for the government to buy boats and get rid of them. Fishermen tend to feel this is no more than their due.

Meanwhile, the Magnuson Act is up for reconsideration in Congress. Economists will tell you the problem is that the resource is free and open to all. Wealth that is free for all is valued by none, they say. Fish are in fact the only natural resource in the United States that is still given away; even cattle ranchers and timber companies pay fees, however small, for their use of public lands. To many economists, the solution is to let fishermen own the fish in the sea or perhaps the right to take them. Fishermen with an ownership stake in Georges Bank cod, a stake they might want to sell sometime, might be expected to husband the resource. They might start, one economist has suggested, by weeding out those cod-eating dogfish.

Anthropologists who study fisheries tend to think the problem is not enough democracy in fisheries management--rather than too much, as some critics of the council system would say. They argue, not unlike the economists, that more local control of a fishery would lead to wiser use of it. The problem with such an approach in a fishery as diverse as New England’s would be that fishermen there tend not to agree on much. When they are not blaming pollution or global warming or the scientists for the decline in fish stocks, they often tend to blame other fishermen. At the Peabody meeting, a man from Cape Cod got up to recommend, not implausibly, a return to hooks and lines; a Maine gillnetter moved that otter trawls be banned from the Gulf of Maine; and otter trawlers from Gloucester loudly denounced all such attempts at discrimination.

Most fishermen recognize that the fishery is in trouble. But most are anything but rich, and many chafe at restraints. Freedom to work when and how they want is one of the things that draw people to fishing; many believe they have a right to fish. What the cod crisis demonstrates is that the world has become too small, and our own numbers too large, for such a right to be acknowledged anymore. It is a privilege that has been abused. That is hard to accept.

You’re talking about people’s livelihoods, says Rosenberg. A scientist looks at it simplistically: ‘The harvest rate should be this, and it’s not, so you should reduce it.’ But when you reduce it, who goes out of business, who has to move away, and who is unemployed?

The difficulty, though, is that at some point there is a biological bottom line. When I was liaison officer to the New England council, I used to call my job A Thousand Ways of Saying You’re Killing Too Many Fish. I was supposed to be passing on the scientific advice--and that’s what it was: ‘You’re killing too many fish. Too many fish are dying due to fishing. The fish are dying more rapidly than they’re reproducing.’ You could say it a thousand ways. But it amounts to the same thing.

All over the world people are failing to hear that message; all over the world, out of desperation and greed, ignorance and mismanagement, people are finding the bottom of fish stocks that once seemed bottomless. Yet it is still shocking that it should happen to cod--stolid, prolific, resilient cod, numberless cod, beef of the sea. It is shocking precisely because we never really did hold cod sacred, not the real flesh-and-blood animals anyway. Though we hardly knew them, we took them for granted--much as hunters once took the buffalo for granted when the prairie was black with them. There is no great mystery about what happened to the buffalo, and none either about what happened to the cod off northeastern America. Men like the ones in that Holiday Inn ballroom--the last of the buffalo hunters--caught them. And the rest of us ate them.

Seafood Faces Collapse by 2048

LA Times, November 3, 2006:

All of the world's fishing stocks will collapse before midcentury, devastating food supplies, if overfishing and other human impacts continue at their current pace, according to a global study published today by scientists in five countries.

Already, nearly one-third of species that are fished — including bluefin tuna, Atlantic cod, Alaskan king crab, Pacific salmon and an array in California fisheries — have collapsed, and the pace is accelerating, the report says.

“by 2000, 38.2% of fish species worldwide had collapsed, and 7.1% had become extinct.”

If that trend continues, the study predicts that "100% of [fished] species will collapse by the year 2048, or around that," said marine biologist Boris Worm, who led the research team. A fishery is considered collapsed if catches fall to 10% of historic highs.

Without more protection soon, the world's ocean ecosystems won't be able to rebound from the shrinking populations of so many fish and other sea creatures, the scientists reported in the journal Science.

"The good news is that it is not too late to turn things around," said Worm, an assistant professor of marine conservation biology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. "It can be done, but it must be done soon."

A U.S. fishing industry group, the National Fisheries Institute, disputed the pessimistic findings, saying that fishermen and government already had acted and that federal data showed that "more than 80% of fish stocks are sustainable and will provide seafood now and for future generations."

The scientists, however, said they were confident of their predictions because they found "consistent agreement of theory, experiments, and observations across widely different scales and ecosystems."

"There's no question if we close our eyes and pretend it's all OK, it will continue along the same trajectory. Eventually, we're going to run out of species," Worm said.

Delving into recent catch data around the world as well as 1,000 years of historical archives in areas such as the San Francisco Bay, the team reported that estuaries, coral reefs, wetlands and oceanic fish were all "rapidly losing populations, species or entire functional groups."

Scarcity of a highly nutritious food supply for the world's growing human population would be the most visible effect of declining ocean species. But the scientists said other disruptions also were occurring as ocean ecosystems unraveled, species by species.

Water quality is worsening, and fish kills, toxic algal blooms, dead zones, invasive exotic species, beach closures and coastal floods are increasing, as wetlands, reefs and the animals and plants that filter pollutants disappear. Climate change also is altering marine ecosystems.

The strength of the new report "lies in the breadth of the array of information the authors used for their analysis," said Andrew Sugden, Science's international managing editor.

First, they analyzed 32 experiments that manipulated species in small areas and reported "a strikingly general picture": Decreased types of species spurred ecosystem-wide problems.

Also, the team assessed United Nations catch data since 1950 for all 64 of the Earth's large marine ecosystems, including the Bering Sea, California Current and Gulf of Mexico.

Changes in native species were also tracked over a 1,000-year period in 12 coastal regions, including San Francisco, Chesapeake and Galveston bays. About 91% suffered at least a 50% decline, and 7% were extinct.

Worldwatch Institute 2006:

In 2003, the world’s fishers harvested a record 133 million tons of fish and shellfish from streams, oceans, and other water bodies—nearly seven times the harvest in 1950. China alone harvested more than one third of this, followed by Peru, India, Indonesia, and the United States.

Today, fishers from developing countries catch three out of four wild fish (by weight), and the developing world earns more from seafood than from any other agricultural commodity. Yet many of the 200 million people worldwide who depend on fisheries for a living cannot afford to eat the fish they catch and handle.

By 2020, aquaculture could produce nearly half of all fish harvested. In China, which raises 70 percent of the world’s farmed fish, it already accounts for nearly two thirds of total fish production.

Wealthier nations purchased 82 percent of the $61 billion of seafood imports in 2002. Shrimp alone accounts for 20 percent of the global seafood trade.

Fishing fleets are now catching 70 percent less cod than they were 30 years ago, and world cod populations could disappear within 15 years, according to WWF. The North American catch has declined by 90 percent since the early 1980s, while the North Sea catch is now just 25 percent of what it was 15 years ago.

A 2004 study in Science found that some farmed salmon have higher levels of PCBs, dioxin, and other contaminants than wild salmon—a potential human health risk.

Menhaden

Menhaden Resource Council:

Menhaden reduction plants, through a process of heating, separating, and drying, produce fish meal, fish oil, and fish solubles from fresh menhaden. Meal is a valuable ingredient in poultry and livestock feeds because of its high protein content (at least 60%). The broiler (chicken) industry is currently the largest user of menhaden meal, followed by the turkey, swine, pet food, and ruminant industries. The aquaculture industry has recently demonstrated an increased demand for fish meal as well.

Menhaden oil has been used for many years as an edible oil in Europe. The oil is refined and used extensively in cooking oils and margarine. In 1989, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) concluded that fully and partially hydrogenated menhaden oil is a safe ingredient for human consumption. In 1990, the FDA proposed an amendment, based on an industry petition, to the standard of identity for margarine to permit the use of marine oils. It was approved in 1997 and could provide a significant new market for omega-3 rich menhaden oil.

Menhaden Fish

The saying goes that "looks can be deceiving," and it’s an accurate expression for the menhaden fish. This little fish plays a powerful role in the undersea world.

The menhaden may be near the bottom of the food chain, but it supports many species from popular sport fish all the way up to Atlantic whales. And if the Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic Ocean are where the menhaden call home, this little fish could win the Good Housekeeping Award. That’s because the menhaden is a filter-feeder, meaning it cleans impurities in the water. That’s crucial to the Chesapeake Bay, where water pollution from farm and sewage runoff is creating increasingly severe problems for the bay and its inhabitants.

But this hard-working little fish is disappearing fast, and its job in the food chain is irreplaceable.

Finding Nemo: What happens to a little fish sucked out of its environment?

The menhaden is not only a small fish, but it’s also rather bony – not exactly appetizing for most people. But there is an enormous fishing operation sucking millions of these little fish out of coastal waters every year. In fact, menhaden make up America’s second largest fishery. So, if people aren’t eating the menhaden, why is this little fish being targeted?

The Omega Protein company vacuums massive quantities – hundreds of thousands of tons - of menhaden through state-of-the-art factory fishing vessels that locate entire schools of these tiny fish. The company then processes menhaden for use as protein supplements and fishmeal.

Ironically, much of Omega’s fishmeal is sold to feed livestock or fish farms - uses that harm marine ecosystems and threaten fishing communities. In fact, one of the main uses for Omega’s fishmeal is as chicken feed, adding to the high-nutrient wastes already choking many bays and estuaries – including the Chesapeake.  Runoff from chicken farms is also connected to the outbreak of toxic algae in the mid-Atlantic region. Omega fishmeal is also used as food for large-scale fish farms, which privatize the oceans and threaten wild fish stocks and traditional fisheries through pollution and parasitic infestations, among other dangers. Most of the remaining fishmeal goes into pet food. 

Menhaden populations today are at near record lows, and there are reports that some of their predators are starting to go hungry. The time to act is now, before the tiny menhaden is lost forever.