Fishing Disaster :: Environment Ecosystem Environmental Essays

Fishing DisasterBackgroundThe ocean around the rocky shores of Newfoundland were in one case so full of cod that explorer John Cabot marveled in 1497 that they almost blocked his ship. In the centuries to follow, seek became the one of the only reasons anyone ever came to Newfoundland, or stayed. Cod was the center of life in the Canadian Maritimes from the beginning. Starting in the 1950s, Huge European trawlers began to travel across the Atlantic to fish the waters off Newfoundland. Some refered to these super-ships as Fish Factories. With the increased effort by these distant-water fleets, stimulatees of Yankee cod increased in the late 1950s and earlier 1960s and peaked at just over 800,000 tons by 1968. However, by 1975 the Candian Government realized the devastating effect this was having on its fish populations and closed its waters to foriegn look for boats. Although this temporarily staved off the growing crisis, European intervention had changed the nature of Canadia n fishing, leading to the development of Canadian own super-trawlers. Disaster StrikesThroughout the 1980s, the annual twist of Canadas northern cod fishing fleet hovered around the 250,000 tonnes mark, as the Canadian government kept promoting much investment. Newfoundlands sm every-scale, inshore cod fishermen, however, were voicing concerns long before anyone else that the abundance of the northern cod population was not as healthy as scientists were reporting. confounding to scientific info, traditional inshore fishermen in Newfoundland began to notice declining catches before the mid-1980s. By 1986 the scientists also realized that the stock was declining, and by 1988 had recommended the total allowable catch be cut in half. Instead of acting immediately, in a precautionary manner to protect dwindling fish stocks by advantageously reducing catch quotas at the first signs of overfishing, the federal government retard conservation action, choosing instead quite moderate red uctions of the total allowable catch beginning in 1989. It wasnt until 1990, following several years of analysis and re-analysis of data from stock surveys (without simultaneously reducing catch quotas) that the Independent Review of the recite of the Northern Cod stock concluded that the population, the biomass, the spawning population, and the spawning biomass of the Northern Cod were all in decline and that fishing-related mortality was at dangerously high levels. By 1992, the biomass estimate for northern cod was the lowest ever measured. The Canadian subgenus Pastor of Fisheries and Oceans had no choice but to declare a ban on fishing northern cod.