TO DESTROY THE COD FISHERY--OR MAYBE TO SAVE IT

 

Last October, the New England Fishery Management Council approved Amendment 25 to the Northeast Multispecies Fishery Management Plan, which promises big changes to the way Atlantic cod are managed.

The new amendment is an outgrowth of the 2023 Atlantic Cod Research Track Stock Assessment, which for the first time divided the Atlantic cod population into four separate stocks.  Previous assessments only divided the population into two stocks, one on Georges Bank and one in the Gulf of Maine, but recent research provided reason to question that approach.  As the 2023 stock assessment noted,

“The [Working Group] recommended that the cod research track process proceeds with four spatial units for assessment:  1) eastern Gulf of Maine, 2) western Gulf of Maine (winter and spring spawners combined), 3) Georges Bank, and 4) southern New England (including the Mid Atlantic Bight).  The rationale for a 4-unit structure, relative to the historic 2-unit model, is better alignment between the scale of cod stock assessment units and biological stock structure that can be supported with available information.”

Because federal law requires that fishery management measures must track the best scientific information available, which in this case means the recent assessment, Amendment 25 will establish four management units for Atlantic cod, each one conforming to one of the newly-defined stocks (biologists believe that there are actually five distinct stocks, but are combining the western Gulf of Maine/Cape Cod winter spawners and western Gulf of Maine spring spawners because they currently lack the information needed to manage them as separate stocks).

Because the 2023 research track assessment has established a new paradigm for Atlantic cod management, the New England Council created an Atlantic Cod Management Transition Plan, which calls for a two-step phase-in of the new management approach.  Phase One would implement Amendment 25 by May 1, 2025, and also implement a new Framework 69 that would set the criteria for determining stock status, and also set catch limits for the 2025 through 2027 fishing years.

Phase Two is not as clearly defined, but contemplates additional frameworks, or perhaps an amendment, that would focus on the long term, may adopt different management units, and could shift allocations or add additional protections for spawning fish.

Last June, a new management track stock assessment, which addressed each of the four newly defined cod stocks, was released after passing peer review, and was submitted to the New England Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee, which then set the Overfishing Limit and Acceptable Biological Catch (which is calculated by adjusting the Overfishing Limit downward to account for scientific uncertainty) for each stock.

All of the stocks are still severely overfished, but the research track assessment and SSC advice still contain some hopeful notes.

While the western Gulf of Maine stock is not only overfished, but also experiencing overfishing, the SSC projects both the Overfishing Limit and Acceptable Biological Catch to increase over the next three years, with the OFL rising from 507 metric tons (1,118,000 pounds) in 2025 to 769 mt (1,695,000 pounds) in 2027, and the ABC also increasing from 387 mt (853,000 pounds) to 586 mt (1,292,000 pounds) over the same period.

In making those projections, the SSC expressed some concerns about the stock’s management.  While the recommended Overfishing Limit and Acceptable Biological Catch will lead to lower landings in the immediate future, making overfishing less likely, the SSC is nonetheless concerned that such projections are overly optimistic; at the same time, it is also concerned about the socioeconomic impacts of the reduced ABCs on participants in the fishery.

In the case of eastern Gulf of Maine cod, the SSC’s projects a declining Overfishing Limit and Acceptable Biological Catch during the period 2025-2027, with the OFL falling from 63 to 39 mt (139,000 to 86,000 pounds) and the ABC dropping from 48 to 30 mt (106,000 to 66,000 pounds).  Cod bycatch in the lobster fishery is thought to be a significant source of removals, but has not been fully quantified nor included in the population models, and so adds uncertainty to the projections.

The southern New England cod stock provided some unique challenges for the Scientific and Statistical Committee.  It is both overfished and experiencing overfishing, but it is the only one of the four stocks that sees the majority of fishing mortality generated by the recreational rather than the commercial sector.  That adds an additional level of uncertainty to the data, as recreational landings areestimated through the Marine Recreational Information Program, and not directly reported by recreational fishermen, so the recreational data is not as precise as that generated by the commercial fishery, which comes from near real-time reporting generated by weigh-out reports.

Other sources of uncertainty include a lack of biological sampling in recent years, concerns about the indices of abundance used in the population model, the level of recreational release mortality, and similar issues.  The Scientific and Statistical Committee’s projections would substantially reduce southern New England stock landings, although such landings would theoretically increase over the 2025-2027 period, with an Overfishing Limit that begins at 29 mt (64,000 pounds) and increases to 65 (143,300 pounds), and an Acceptable Biological Catch that rises from 22 mt (48,500 pounds) to 36 (79,000 pounds).  The 2025 ABC is so small that, assuming that Framework 69 is approved by the National Marine Fisheries Service, recreational fishermen will not be allowed to harvest any southern New England cod from federal waters next year.

The fourth stock, Georges Bank cod, is not experiencing overfishing, but is very badly overfished.  Its spawning stock biomass is the lowest ever recorded, at the same time that low recruitment is preventing the stock from rebuilding.  Scientists attempting to rebuild the stock have also been hampered by insufficient port sampling and difficulties in determining the stock’s age composition.  The Scientific and Statistical committee reduced Georges Bank cod landings for the period 2025-2027, while projecting that the size of the stock will continue to decline.  The Overfishing Limit will fall from 518 mt (1,142,000 pounds) to 420 mt (926,000 pounds), with the Acceptable Biological Catch dropping from 397 mt (875,000 pounds) to 321 (708,000 pounds).

Across all stocks, the Annual Catch Limit for Atlantic cod will be cut by 43 percent, from 667.4 mt (1,471,517 pounds) in 2024 to 382.9 mt (844,150 pounds) in 2005.

Right now, because the four-stock structure is new, neither rebuilding times nor the fishing mortality rates needed to rebuild the stocks have been calculated, although such calculations will be made at some point in early 2025.

It seems like a worthwhile way to approach Atlantic cod management.  For the first time, the stocks established for management purposes will roughly accord with the biological stocks, which should provide a more effective management structure.  Managing multiple stocks with a one-size-fits-all management approach rarely works very well.

I used to do quite a bit of codfishing, most of it near Block Island and out on Rhode Island’s Cox’s Ledge, areas that would now be considered within the southern New England stock’s range.  Back in the late 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, when most of my codfishing took place, fish were abundant on those grounds, and it wasn’t necessary to venture out on the coldest and most hostile seas of the year; anglers caught plenty of cod, some of them in excess of 50 pounds, while fishing in their shirtsleeves on a flat midsummer ocean.

Those memories stirred a bit of excitement 15 or 20 years ago when, after years of near-complete absence, a relatively strong run of cod appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, on my old fishing grounds.  If Amendment 25 and Framework 69 had been in place back then, the southern New England cod stock might have been given a chance to rebuild, and fishing could be even better today.  Instead, recreational and commercial fishing boats pounded the fish incessantly, with boats from everywhere between New York Harbor and Cape Cod renting winter dock space in Montauk, New York and in various Rhode Island ports, so that they could be closer to the fishing grounds.

It wasn’t very long until the newly-abundant  cod had disappeared again.  As one writer from East Hampton, New York noted a few years ago,

“From a fishing perspective, it was as quiet a season as I could ever recall…The quietness also marked the first time that I never went out for codfish, which are usually most prevalent during the winter in our local waters…But not this winter.  It just never happened.

“While my enthusiasm for fishing never waned, there was an acute problem that was fundamentally impossible to rectify.  With little to no codfish around, there were no boats willing to sail.  It was depressing.”

But if fishermen don’t let fish stocks rebuild, and instead do their best to wipe out the first strong year class to appear in a couple of decades, that’s what results.

Atlantic cod are the poster child for an overfished, mismanaged stock, that saw U.S. landings fall from around 117,775,000 pounds in 1980 to a little under 1,095,000 pounds in 2023.  And Framework 69 is going to force that total even lower, to a bit under 845,000 pounds.

While there’s no doubt that 1980 Atlantic cod landings were far too high to be sustainable, and helped to assure the population’s demise, the fact that cod landings fell by more than 99 percent over the course of 43 years is a pretty good indication that something was very, very wrong with the way the fishery was managed for a very long time.

Amendment 25, and any subsequent frameworks, promise to bring a meaningful change to the way cod are managed, and perhaps provide a ray of hope that cod stocks might rebuild.

So, in a move that comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with the New England approach to fisheries management, commercial fishermen in the northeast are objecting to the new Amendment, claiming that it will destroy what remains of the Atlantic cod fishery.

The website Seafood Source quotes Jerry Leeman, the CEO of the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association as saying,

“These restrictions are going to be the end of the trawlers and anyone else buying fish.  Everyone in the fisheries expects Amendment 25 to torpedo their businesses.”

He claims that Amendment 25 will

“permanently destroy the centuries-old cod fishing business.”

As a result of such sentiments, fishermen protested ahead of the New England Council’s December meeting, hoping to prevent Amendment 25’s passage, but their efforts were to no avail.

That’s probably a good thing, because while many fishermen blame restrictive regulations for destroying their businesses, they tend to ignore the role played by the decades they spent overfishing the stock, driving it down to levels that make such regulations necessary.  

Yet no matter how far stocks decline, it is still the rare fisherman—or, at least the rare fisherman who makes his or her living off the backs of dead fish—who will ever acknowledge that strict, effective regulation remains the only thing that might, with a good helping of luck, bring their moribund fishery back from to some semblance of life.

It's an ever rarer fisherman who is willing to admit to the need for regulations that will keep a fishery from collapsing in the first place.

That’s not just true for cod, but for a host of fisheries ranging from winter flounder to—sadly—striped bass.  But cod, due to their historic importance, their former abundance, and their cultural value in the northeast, will probably always remain as the foremost example of how much can go wrong when needed management measures are not put in place.