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Scientists Shocked As Fisheries Collapse On West Coast: ‘It’s The Worst We’ve Seen”
Scientists Shocked As Fisheries Collapse On West Coast: ‘It’s The Worst We’ve Seen”
Photo Credit: Alaska Outdoors Supersite
The Gulf of Alaska cod populations appears to have taken a nose-dive. Scientists are shocked at the collapse and starving fish, making this the “worst they’ve ever seen.”
“They [Alaskan cod] get weak and die or get eaten by something else,” said NOAA’s Steve Barbeaux. The 2017 trawl net survey found the lowest numbers of cod on record forcing scientists to try to unravel what happened. A lot of the cod hatched in 2012 appeared to survive, but by 2017, those fish were largely gone for the surveys, which also found scant evidence of fish born in subsequent years. Many of the cod that have come on board trawlers are “long skinny fish” according to Brent Paine, executive director of United Catcher Boats.
“This is a big deal,” Paine said. “We just don’t see these (cod) year classes disappear from one year to the next.” The decline is expected to substantially reduce the gulf cod harvests that in recent years have been worth — before processing — more than $50 million to Northwest and Alaska fishermen who catch them with nets, pot traps, and baited hooks set along the sea bottom.
Barbeaux says the warm water, which has spread to depths of more than 1,000 feet, hit the cod like a kind of a double-whammy. Higher temperatures sped up the rate at which young cod burned calories while reducing the food available for the cod to consume. And many are blaming “climate change” for the effects on the fish, although scientists aren’t directly correlating the two events. “They get weak and die or get eaten by something else,” said Barbeaux, who in October presented preliminary survey findings to scientists and industry officials at an Anchorage meeting of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council.
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Baker: New Fish Science Report Paints Dizzying Picture For Industry Future
Baker: New Fish Science Report Paints Dizzying Picture For Industry Future.
It might be one of the most important fish science reports in years, but it was released with so little fanfare, you could forgive even the most hardcore of fisheries observers for missing it.
The report was released online in late November and it’s called “Short-Term Stock Prospects for Cod, Crab and Shrimp in the Newfoundland and Labrador Region (Divisions 2J3KL).”
It basically looks at the effect of warming oceans and then sets the table for the next three to five years in the shrimp, crab and cod fisheries. For those of you doing the math, those species represent more than $600 million worth of annual economic activity in the province.
The report is significant for many reasons, the first of which is the fact that it doesn’t look at species independently — it brought all of DFO’s primary scientists (the ones that haven’t been cut by the current federal government anyways) together at one table. That rarely happens.
The report is also significant for the picture it paints. And the news for the fishing industry as a whole is not good.
