Only remotely related to climate change, but perhaps related to politics polluting universities, this essay floats ideas concerning our nations fisheries, and fishes for feedback from WUWT readers.
Guest essay by Caleb Shaw
When I was just a small child in the 1950’s the United States stubbornly clung to having a mere three-mile-limit, and Russian fishermen could come quite close to our shores with boats loaded with spying equipment. They also overfished the Grand Banks and our other offshore waters with deep, bottom-churning dragnets to such a degree the codfish population crashed. Even when the three-mile-limit was pushed far off shore, the codfish never came back.
The fishermen have taken a lot of heat for the failure of the codfish to return, and university biologists have worked hand in hand with paper-shuffling bureaucrats in Washington, far from the briny swells and crying gulls, and these lubbers tell sea-going men, men who know the sea like the back of their hands, what to do about the sea.
The fishermen have no choice but obey the bosses in high places, and their fishing has been cut back more and more. It has not made a lick of difference. In fact, if you wanted to use absurd logic, you could say the situation proves that the less you fish the less fish there are. Either that or you could say that whenever Washington gets involved, things get screwed up.
In actual fact there are three main reasons the codfish population hasn’t come back, despite the fact a single mother codfish lays over a million eggs.
The first reason is that the Atlantic goes through a cycle, roughly sixty years long, called the AMO, (Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation,) and in a simplistic way this suggests that the best breeding conditions for a codfish only comes around every sixty years. Right now we are back to the conditions of 1953, the year I was born.
In actual fact the shifting positions of warm water and cold water created by the AMO mean that there are different places in the North Atlantic, which, every year, may be having their peak year for breeding codfish.
You will please notice that fishermen have no control over the AMO. Even if there was a population explosion of cod, there is another harvester of cod besides fishermen: Seals.
Seals happen to be very cute, and they started being protected when their soulful eyes touched people back in the 1970’s. Recently their population explosion has gotten out of hand. For example, in 1994 on Muskeget Island there were 19 grey seals, and by 2011 it was difficult to count them all; there were between 3500 and 3800. The population of Grey Seals in Massachusetts alone has passed 15,000, and the population of Harbor Seals in New England has passed 100,000. (Read More: http://www.talkingfish.org/newengland-fisheries/booming-new-england-seal-population-creates-a-management-challenge
Even if there were only 100,000 seals in New England, if they each ate five codfish a day, that would a million codfish every two days. That adds up pretty quickly. We are talking a sizable catch of 182.5 million codfish per year.
The seals will not obey the environmentalists who tell the fishermen to fish less, even though they owe their lives to environmentalists, for rather than fish less, the seals fish more and more. What is especially annoying to fishermen, who are not allowed to shoot seals, is that the seals like to follow boats and steal fish right out of the nets.
Is this a return to natural conditions? Not really, because for thousands of years, long before the “white man” came, the natural predator of seals was Native Americans. Native Americans had really neat sea-going canoes; dugouts made of the trunks of huge white pines, and hunted for not only seals, but also whales (though likely the baby whales were preferred.)
Even the most ancient of known mound-building Native American people, the Red Paint People, who lived north of New England, had swordfish bills in their graves, and, because swordfish lack swim-bladders and sink to the bottom rather than floating to the shore, this is taken as indirect evidence that, even as long ago a ten thousand years ago, (before Stonehenge in England,) seagoing humans hunted our shores. In other words, this may be the first time in ten thousand years seals are not hunted.
What other natural predator may have existed, ten thousand years ago, which hunted seals? Evidence is scant, however a subspecies of polar bear may have roamed this far south, as the seas rose after the last ice age, and covered the ancient shorelines.
The only predator we are sure of is the Great White Shark. And now that seal populations are booming, such scary sharks are becoming more common off Cape Cod. For the first time since 1936 a swimmer was attacked, last summer.
That single attack made people think more about culling the population of seals than the suffering of hundreds of fishermen. Likely this occurred because people are greedy, and tourism brings in money, and news of swimmers being eaten by Great White Sharks is bad for business. Unfortunately, besides the tourists brought in by whale watching, there are tourists brought in by seal watching, and, because seals are cute while sharks are downright ugly, some think the Great White Sharks are the ones who ought be culled.
Perhaps we ought bring in a population of polar bears. They are cute, and eat seals, and people feel all warm and cozy when the polar bear population goes up, and, if a few swimming tourists got eaten, well; you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
You’ll notice nobody talks much about 182.5 million codfish getting devoured. Why not? The answer is obvious. Ever look a codfish in the face? They are most definitely not cute. (Nor are most of the fishermen, whose livelihoods depend on codfish.)
I hate to sound cynical, but it seems to me a lot of the university biologists, rather than basing their conclusions on science, are basing conclusions, (which usually conclude fishermen should make less money by fishing less,) on a sort of political correctness founded upon money, votes, and, damn it all, cuteness.
If university biologists were true scientists they would ignore all the nonsense of the non-scientific idiots ruling Washington, and study a third and likely most significant reason for the decline in codfish populations. This involves the fact that, when a mother codfish lays a million eggs, they are very tiny eggs. In fact, for the first few weeks of a codfish’s life, codfish are basically plankton. It is only after three or four weeks that they stop swirling about the surface, and sink to deeper depths and start behaving like a more ordinary minnow.
During the time they are plankton they are constantly growing. Many of the species of plankton about them do not grow. A tiny critter that devours countless codfish may need to turn tail a week later, because the cod it missed might turn around and eat it.
Consider the interesting computer modeling this might involve, for a geek at a university. How often in nature does the predator become the prey? Does a baby deer grow up to eat a mountain lion, or a baby rabbit grow up to eat foxes? However, in the world of codfish, such is the case. What an interesting “K,” (The equilibrium constant,.) to play around with!
It just might be that the reason the Codfish population isn’t recovering is because a certain species of plankton is eating them all. However, if only those million babies could be sheltered for only three weeks, and released, they would devour the very foe that has been depressing the codfish population, whereupon, without that foe devouring the smallest codfish, those smaller ones would also mature and eat the foe, until the foe became few and far between, and codfish populations would explode.
It should be noted that “white men” first came over here from Europe, perhaps as long ago as the 1300’s, for one risky but lucrative reason, and that reason was to fish for codfish. There is much argument about when the fishing first started, but European fishermen certainly were sailing here before there were any “official” colonies. They had no desire to take over or start colonies, and only briefly landed here to build fires and dry their fish, before sailing back east to Europe. Why did they go to all that trouble? Because it was lucrative. Why? Because, according to histories I’ve read, the codfish were so thick on the Grand Banks they didn’t need to use nets. They used over-sized baskets, to dip the fish from the swarming sea.
Considering such a population boom is within the realm of possibility, and considering the good such a vast source of high-protein nourishment would be to a hungry humanity, I can only wonder over the fact not a single university smarty-pants has (as far as I know,) ever proposed a codfish hatchery.
We spend millions on hatcheries for trout and salmon, but not a penny on codfish hatcheries. We spend billions on stupid wind turbines that are counter-productive, but not a penny on a single boat for the reestablishment codfish populations.
What sort of boat? It would be a boat designed to strip mother codfish of their million-plus eggs, milk father codfish of their sperm, keep the fertilized eggs and hatchling in a safe, predator-free environment until they were two, three or four weeks old, and then release them to the wild. In other words: a hatchery.
I’m sure creating such a tub would involve all sorts of problems. However isn’t that what universities are for? To use our brilliant, young minds to solve problems?
I’m sure it would cost money, however considering the trillions spent on welfare, on unproductive losers, (on thin air,) a “mere” half billion spent building three or four small, sea-going hatcheries, and staffing them, (and many students would actually like wallowing about the Grand Banks and getting sea-sick, and do it for free,) might be an acceptable risk, as an investment. Especially when there is at least a small chance that having actual hatcheries for codfish might restore populations to their former amazing levels.
I know young and naïve students would leap at the chance of supplying the hungry world with a huge stock of codfish, even if the scheme seemed a bit hare-brained to their pragmatic elders.
I also know these same students are sick to death of having to affix “Global Warming” to the final paragraph of each and every report, whether it be about the mating habits of nematodes, or about when dogs howl at the moon, simply to get a parking place at the college cafeteria.
Kids are not as stupid as we old geezers sometimes think, you know.
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I likely should have studied attempts to “farm” codfish more deeply before I whipped this essay off, but I figured the readership of WUWT would do my work for me, and they have. (It is a lazy attitude, I know, but I run a Childcare that is open twelve hours a day and also have a big garden and some goats, so I am not altogether lazy.)
I am going to stick updates onto my essay. Among other things I’ve learned outside of WUWT is that Canada has actually proposed culling their population of seals. They were talking several hundred thousand seals in a year. I’m not sure how much opposition the proposal has run into.
Most attempts to breed codfish do not attempt to return the fish to the sea, but rather to “farm” codfish in the way salmon are farmed. An attempt in England just shut down.
This simple thought applies to many species and problems. Take for example the rare and endangered KlamathSsuckerfish. Saving it has destroyed many farms and dams. Just breed it and spread it around the area.
And a reverse thought, Silver Carp, illegal immigrants are now a huge problem. So how about breeding the native carnivores and setting them loose. They are much better to eat as well.
Thanks for the graph, Willis. Just what I needed.
Seals also eat a lot of herring. Herring fishermen are not too fond of seals, either.
Many thanks for that common sense report. Predator species must be controlled if the natural balance of an area has been destroyed. In UK we have started a cull of badgers because of the steep rise of Bovine TB carried by badgers who then infect cattle and they are then destroyed at great cost to the taxpayer. Badger numbers are unnaturally high since from 1997 badgers were protected. We have now nearly lost the hedgehog, a prey specie of the badger, because of the protection imposed by government on the badger which ensured its rocketing numbers.
If you think US fisheries are dysfunctional you should take a look at the EU common fisheries policy.
James Bull says:
June 13, 2013 at 12:46 am
James is a little behind events as some progress has been, mostly as a result of a campaign headed by tv presenter Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall called fish-fight. See below.
http://www.fishfight.net/
Caleb, thanks for a nice work in fish biology taking me nostalgically back to my university days. I spent a fortnight in a converted French trawler (“research vessel”) criss-crossing the Celtic Sea /Bay of Biscay, sampling the water column around the continental shelf edge to assess precisely what you are talking about here, the density of food items in the immediate vicinity of fish larvae, in this case those of Scomber scomber, the Atlantic mackerel.
To a zooplankton organism less than 1mm long, water is a viscous syrup and moving through it is expensive energetically. A larva hatches from the egg with limited reserves of yolk food energy. Thus early survival is determined largely by how many suitable food items are close enough to be eaten by it – and also of course by proximity of predators. As you say, predators can later become prey, e.g. large copepods, medusa and other fish larvae, and don’t forget that cod fish larvae are cannibalistic, readily eating little bro/sis.
In our study the main determinant was actually ocean circulation and upwelling, as you also suggest, since more vertical mixing resulted in lower food particle density and lower first feeding success and survival. However it is a complex two-way street since upwelling is beneficial in bringing nutrients to the surface to fuel phytoplankton blooms which prop up the whole food chain, that is the reason why the spawning takes place at the continental shelf edge. What is optimal is a suitable alternation of mixing for nutrient upwelling with periods of stability and stratification for increased density of food particles.
Thus it is likely that oceanographic changes linked to the AMO will affect cod populations. Of course biological factors cant be excluded, such as species shifts changing the food item or predator density in the mm size range.
The Pacific Salmon runs improved dramatically and almost immediately when the PDO flipped, (almost but not quite universally – the King runs on some of the Alaskan rivers are way down). Cod fish in the Atlantic have a history of mysteriously crashing. Current thinking is it was the Codfish disappearing that extinguished the Viking colonies in the New World in the thirteenth century. Why did the Codfish disappear – probably AMO-type shift (just my guess) Another thing in your Atlantic experience that mirrors the Pacific experience – the return of the Sea Lions to Puget Sound. When the Sea Lion population surged in the seventies and eighties (coupled with the PDO shift to warm) The Salmon fishing was more than decimated. People understandably blamed the Sea Lions because they could do the math, Sea Lions eat a lot of Salmon. But the Salmon fishing in Puget Sound has been really good the last few years, despite the Sea Lion population. Speculating, I think the cold PDO shift positively effects the food chain for Salmon. The runs immediately got so much better and have remained strong since 2007. It seems the best explanation for why there are so many more Salmon now than there were for the last thirty years. i don’t think men or seals fishing have near as big an impact as these multi-decadal temperature shifts do – but again its largely my speculative opinion, not science.
Good to see someone taking on the seals. Baby harp seals were the poster child of environmentalism in the 1970s, just as poley bears are now. Commercial fishermen hate seals, with good reason. Indeed, even recreational fishers have discovered that a population explosion of seals means that you can spend a day in what used to be a good fishing spot and come back with few or no fish.
The “cuteness” factor has a lot to answer for. In real life, neither seals nor poley bears are particularly cute – they are opportunistic predators whose population is largely governed by the availability of food and lack of predation on themselves.
Management of ocean fisheries seems to be pretty primitive, and highlights the fact that we still have an awful lot to learn about the sea.
David Riser says:
June 12, 2013 at 11:34 pm
Fisheries is serious stuff, you need to keep your facts straight. Codfish are born and grow in about 200meters of water to start with followed by heading to the seabed where they stay. Hatcheries have been tried and are largely unsuccessful. The amount of fish the fleet can pull in obviously exceeded the carrying capacity of the species. This is not unusual and is a common theme among a great number of fish stocks. …
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Nice short essay David. I recently, I can’t recall why, had occasion to read up on the US West Coast sardine fishery. There was once a very large sardine fishery on the West Coast. The cannery row at Monterrey, CA that Steinbeck wrote about canned sardines. The fishery declined after WWII, collapsed in the 1950s and was gone completely by the early 1970s. It’s back today although (heavily regulated) landings are miniscule compared to the fishery’s heyday in the mid 20th century.
There’s little doubt that the sardines were overfished. But there also seems to be a pretty well supported, and not completely understood, cyclic alternation in small bait fish in the region between anchovies and sardines with a period of about 60 years.
My point? This stuff is complicated. There may well be simple answers, but just because an answer is simple, doesn’t mean that it’s the right simple answer.
This article plus comments explains exactly why this blog is so successful.
So much to learn and read. So many expert commentators.
The only predator we are sure of is the Great White Shark. And now that seal populations are booming, such scary sharks are becoming more common off Cape Cod. For the first time since 1936 a swimmer was attacked, last summer.
Same thing in Western Australia … not just seals but more importantly whale populations which are recovering above 10% pa since protection in 1978, with few predators/scavengers except great whites. These protected sharks are also recovering since protection in 1999 and they’re following the whale pods close to a 2,000km WA shoreline where the beaches are dotted with large numbers of small mammalian snacks called humans.
Seven shark fatalities in WA from 1896 to 1994. Two fatalities from 1925 to 1994. Twelve fatalities since 1995, five in the year to July 2012, and almost all great white shark attacks.
Attacks are during the mid-year months of whale migration … now. I think it’s great that whale numbers are booming but the evidence suggests there’s a price to pay and West Australians in particular should sink their teeth into the modern hazards of winter swimming … http://www.washarkattacks.net
Caleb, you have a great writing style. You keep your reader entertained. And yes, leave it to the readership to fill in any blanks!
The lesson of the seals is appropriate. Only if we consider man to be a invasive species can we conclude that our footprint must be zero. And that is exactly what the eco terrorists promote.
I’m stealing a moment from work, but have to rush back because I’m taking a group of kids (irony) fishing.
I just wanted to say that the fishermen I’ve known are pretty interested in what biologists have to say. I got steamed, back in the 1970’s, when a visiting biologist wasn’t the slightest bit interested in what fishermen in Maine had to say, however now that biologists have seen their efforts fail there seem to be more biologists that listen to fishermen. Fishermen are willing to try nearly anything to get the cod population back to what it once was. It’s not like people aren’t trying.
The comment above about sand eels in Europe gets me steamed. It makes no sense to throw fish back that are already dead, or that have exploded bladders and must die. The people writing the laws need to go out on a boat. Surely common sense ought to kick in at some point.
Thanks to all who have commented.
Hey, I’m all for sustainability. Let’s turn the seals into biodiesel. Ya, that’s the ticket. Who could argue with that? We get seal oil and more fish at the same time. We can replace grain with blubber derived fuel. The greens have never had such an opportunity. Protect your cods and “whack a seal today” can be the rally cry!
Married a very lovely lady from Nfld, and with her many brother telling me that while growing up they rarely saw seals or either did their parents who fished the Grand Banks. Now, they tell me they are everywhere….gave this ‘west coast’ person a whole new perspective on what really is going on at the East coast.
You missed one serious fact: Seals were far more numerous when the colonists landed than they are today. Coincidentally, the cod were so plentiful they drove the economics of the colonies. I highly recommend a book called, “COD” by Mark Kurlansky if you want to understand more about this fishery. I believe you have many of your facts wrong. http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0140275010
Excellent article.
As a historian of fisheries science I am on soundest ground on the period prior to 1945, but the importance of what has occurred in the past 70 years has forced me to engage with more recent science and policy. I would argue that fisheries science shares the honours with meteorology of being the most heavily politicized science, because it is difficult to draw a line between science, management and policy. If anyone here is interested in exploring this topic further, I would strongly recommend Carmel Finley’s All the Fish in the Sea which explores the origin of US fisheries policy and covers the reason the US opposed extension of 3 mile limits for as long as it did. American fisheries scientists provided the scientific justification to assist in the policies.
Briefly, the opposition to extension lay in three major policy goals: 1) American Pacific fishermen wanted access to South American fisheries in the wake of the sardine stock collapses off California; 2) American reconstruction goals for Japan, which is heavily dependent on fish, meant safeguarding Japanese access to major fisheries that fell within coastal zones off Canada on both coasts; and 3) American military interests required access to nearshore zones around the world. (The US was supported in the latter by the Foreign Office in GB). To justify these fisheries policies, American (and other) fisheries scientists promoted the ‘regulation’ of the fisheries harvest at Maximum Sustained Yield – which argued that there was a maximum level of fishing harvest that was sustainable and that should be the goal of the industry. This theory, unfortunately, was untestable because of the impossibility of actually accurately measuring and analyzing the population size and demographics in the catch vs. the fish left in the sea. The result, off California and on the Grand Banks, Iceland, and in the North Sea, was a free-for-all, with international interests (notably the USSR and Japan) competing to see who could take most. I have no doubt that technological intensification and the ghost of T.H. Huxley’s dictum that the fisheries were inexhaustible, contributed substantially to the fisheries collapses.
As for seals, Canada has been vilified by the EU for its seal hunt, which ended with this traditional harvest being stopped despite its important, centuries-old role in helping to sustain Newfoundland fishermen. Indigenous populations who are not ‘first nations’ but instead of European origin don’t get a lot of respect, even the friendly and not over-wealthy Newfoundlanders. Seals, meanwhile, have pretty obviously replaced humans as the main harvesters of cod. Fisheries biologists I know are universally in favour of reinstating the seal hunt.
Scientists at the St. Andrews Biological Station in New Brunswick, which has pioneered marine aquaculture on Canada’s east coast, are focusing efforts on developing cod farming. Fish hatcheries have been the quintessential solution to overfishing in the US: they were HUGE under Spencer Fullerton Baird in the 19th century. Unfortunately, fish eggs are prone to fungal and bacterial infection in hatcheries, and produce weakened fry that are vulnerable once put in the wold. Rigorous Canadian studies of the efficacy of fish hatcheries in the 1920s and 1930s concluded that they were purely a waste of money and the fish populations did not rise commensurate with the number of hatchlings released (if in fact they even showed any change from what would be seen with the fish that hatched in the wild). Recent efforts, assisted by greater scientific understanding, are more successful, but I believe that such fish are considered ‘tainted’ by environmentalists, and can now only be used (in Canada at least) to feed the fish farming industry (I am referring, here, to the salmon hatcheries). I would appreciate any clarification on this.
Of course, the problem with farming fish is that baitfish fisheries still have to be continued to make the feed on which fish farms defend, which may extend the vicious cycle of capturing small and underage fish. One factor that exacerbated the collapse of the Canadian Atlantic codfish fisheries was the fact that Canadian scientists were treating the Western stocks as being analogous to the eastern codfish stocks in the North Atlantic. It turns out that, due to colder water conditions, western cod mature at a later age than the eastern Atlantic cod, which means that the fishery was harvesting a majority of cod in the 1980s that had not reached reproductive age.
Fisheries science is devilishly difficult, and the mysteries of changing climate are only one complication in trying to understand how and why fish populations fluctuate.
Willis, does “production” mean number caught? If it does then you must consider the ban on cod fishing by theCanadiam government.
Dave says:
June 13, 2013 at 6:47 am
You missed one serious fact: Seals were far more numerous when the colonists landed than they are today. Coincidentally, the cod were so plentiful they drove the economics of the colonies. I highly recommend a book called, “COD” by Mark Kurlansky if you want to understand more about this fishery. I believe you have many of your facts wrong.
————
I equally strongly recommend 1491 by Charles Mann, which describes what the Americas were like before Columbus made first contact and a series of epidemics of European origin wiped out up to 95% of the indigenous population of North and South America. Population ecologists now suspect that those massive herds of buffalo and other ungulates, and the huge populations of pigeon and other game birds, was the result of the removal of their main predators – ie human beings. I have little doubt that seals were harvested quite intensively by the indigenous populations wherever seal and man came into contact. I’ve read Kurlansky, and appreciate his arguments, but I suspect he is dealing with outdated scientific tropes here, as are many environmentalists.
vigilantfish, I have admired your posts for years, and now you have explained your moniker!
As you say, “fisheries science is devilishly difficult.” I suspect that one reason so much of it is, frankly, crap, is that we tend to extrapolate the thinking that is applied to land-based conservation to the ocean. For example, in resurrecting the buffalo population in the US, it was pretty easy to ban hunting and make land available for them to graze and breed. We could quite easily see them, count them and so on.
It is obvious that the ocean environment is much more complicated and harder to measure and monitor. In a crude sense, taking too many fish out of a population will affect breeding, but the rise and fall of fish populations seems to be driven by other factors as well. For example, here in Australia there was a lot of concern about a sharp decline in southern bluefin tuna populations a few years ago, so strict fishing quotas were put in place. Yet, within a timeframe much shorter than the conventional view of breeding would suggest, the population rebounded dramatically. It may be that both the decline and the rebound were influenced by factors that we do not understand.
Grappling with the mysteries of the oceans is a great cure for homo sapiens hubris.
People, especially ones with an emotional reaction to the subject, don’t consider the knock-on effects of what they are doing. A number of years ago they put a ban on fishing Rockfish (Striped Bass) in the Chesapeake Bay due to overfishing. They came back with a bang, but the crab fishing crashed at the same time. Turns out crab is one of the favorite foods of Rockfish.
Re: Russian fishing/spy boats…
Back in the late 70’s I worked for Canada’s Fisheries and Oceans department developing a database to track foreign fishing vessels licensed to fish in Canadian waters — specifically the Eastern fisheries since they were acknowledged by the experts to be in deep trouble. The database maintained an inventory of all the electronic equipment on board the vessel and it was verified when our inspectors boarded the ships. The Russian boats were my “boundary condition”…when printed out the list of sonars, radars, radios, and other gear was an inch thick. I was surprised they had room for all the fish they took.
Of course our government of the day (Pierre Trudeau’s) did nothing about the over fishing or spying. Although in fairness to the Russians the Spanish were the worst offenders for the former.
Hi Joanna,
Thanks! I did think of changing my moniker to Vigilant Sea Kitten, in honour of PETA’s attempts to make fish more cuddly for the sake of their animal rights activism (I thought it might sound more fetching). My attempt failed as I am a technological incompetent.
Another reason cod are having difficulty re-establishing is that there are not enough larger cod to keep the smaller fish that eat very young cod at bay. The obvious solution is to farm cod until it is sufficiently large to prey on these other predators.