New Genomics Paper proves overfishing Atlantic Cod not the key problem

Declining size of Cod is shown to be simply due to the collapse of their ocean feeding pastures

Overfishing has surely been terrible for the cod, but far far worse has been the collapse of their food, the ocean plankton.

Fishing moratoriums are proven ineffective in Bringing Back The Fish, only restoration of their ocean pastures can help them

In a new study, which focuses on Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) off Newfoundland in Canada and off Norway, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Overfishing did not cause the Atlantic cod, an iconic species, to evolve genetically and mature earlier, and become reduced in size according to a study led by Rutgers University and the University of Oslo—the first of its kind—with major implications for ocean conservation.

“Evolution has been used in part as an excuse for why cod and other species have not recovered from overfishing,” said first author Malin L. Pinsky, professor at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

“Our findings suggest instead that more attention to reducing fishing and addressing other environmental changes, including climate change, will be important for allowing recovery. We can’t use evolution as a scapegoat for avoiding the hard work that would allow cod to recover.”

Well-fed vs starving Cod, no mystery here as the starving cod has become the norm in the catch of North Atlantic Cod for decades.

In the Northwest Atlantic Ocean, cod range from Greenland to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. The largest individual on record was 1.5 m (5 ft) long and weighed 47 kg (103 lb), but for decades now a big cod has been more like 40-50 cm (a mere 18 inches) in length and weighing less than 5kg (10lbs). Atlantic cod can live for 25 years or more, and when they have access to plentiful food supplies attain sexual maturity between ages two and four. Cod populations dominated by very large individuals will produce more and healthier offspring and thus become less vulnerable to predators.

Atlantic cod is one of the most heavily fished species. Atlantic cod was fished for a thousand years by north European fishers who followed it across the North Atlantic Ocean to North America. It was supporting the US and Canada’s fishing economy until 1992 when there was a moratorium on fishing cod with the expectation that the fish if protected from fishing would naturally recover.

Atlantic Cod territories

The moratorium was deemed necessary as Cod stocks in the 1990s were shown to have declined by more than 95% of their historical numbers. The moratorium failed to bring back the fish and in large part continues to this day, lasting 30 years not the 3-5 years fisheries scientists promised when the fishing ban went into effect.

Endless academic debates over the last three decades have centered on whether cod might be evolving to be smaller in size and numbers in response to fisheries, a ‘popular idea blaming the ‘usual suspects’ known as fisheries-induced evolution. The concern has been that if the fish have evolved, they may not be able to recover even if fishing is reduced, according to Pinsky.

Prior to the new study, no one had tried to sequence whole genomes from before intensive fishing to determine whether evolution had occurred. So, scientists sequenced cod earbones and scales from 1907 in Norway, 1940 in Canada and modern cod from the same populations. The northern Canadian population of cod collapsed from overfishing in the early 1990s, while the northeast Arctic population near Norway faced high fishing rates but smaller declines, the study says.

“We found that cod likely did not evolve in response to fisheries,” Pinsky said.

“There were no major losses in genetic diversity and no major changes that suggested intensive fishing induced evolution. It’s more likely that the fish are developing earlier as a response to their environment and would be able to develop and mature later if the environment changes, benefiting the species.”

“A big question is whether other species, especially those with shorter lifespans, may show signs of evolution, in contrast to the long-lived cod,” Pinsky said. “We are investigating this by DNA sequencing 100-year-old specimens from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.”

I am delighted to read that this team of ocean fish geneticists is working to unravel what genomic clues it can with regard to the Atlantic Cod. It is disappointing that they seem fixated on trying to reserve some part of the decades-long foolish focus on ‘over-fishing’ as the politically correct ‘usual suspects’ to blame.  There is an alternative.

We can restore the Atlantic Cod back to historic abundance in just a few years.

Some years ago, 2014, I prepared this ‘blog post’ as an open letter to The Pew Charitable Trusts. It is even made all the more important today with the publication of this fine report on Cod genetics.

The top fish-head at the Pew Charitable Trust has published an op-ed about the disappearing Atlantic Cod titled, “Pray For Return of Atlantic Cod Population” in a New England Eco publication.  Here’s my open letter in response… pew pew pew…

The continued preying on the ‘usual suspects’ by the author, Peter Baker of Pew Charitable Trusts, who authored this Pew missive and hundreds like him misses the mark by a country mile. In spite of his tip of the hat to ecosystem changes, his op-ed reveals as much intransigence in his and his institutions nature as that of the over-fishermen he heaps blame upon.

Conservation fails

In 1992 the Canadian Federal Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, John Crosbie, declared a moratorium on the Northern Cod fishery, which for the preceding 500 years had largely shaped the lives and communities of Canada’s eastern coast. Fishing societies interplay with the resources which they depend on: fisheries transform the ecosystem, which pushes the fishery and society to adapt. In the summer of 1992, when the Northern Cod biomass fell to 1% of its historic abundance. Canada’s government declared a moratorium ending the region’s 500-year relentless attack on the Atlantic Cod.

In spite of the now three-decade-long conservation moratorium on commercial cod fishing in the North Atlantic the fish have still not returned. The simple fact has been and is that the Atlantic Cod were starved into near extinction due to the collapse of productivity of their ocean pastures. The fact that Cod and fish everywhere are disappearing in lockstep with the very clearly shown collapse of ocean pastures makes things easier to understand.

All Beef Is Grass

If we can help people understand the easily understood and common concept of pastures as they relate to ocean fish, the means to bringing the fish back becomes obvious. Pastures, whether on land or at sea, can only sustain ‘livestock’ if the pastures are growing grass (phyto-plankton).

Walt Whitman taught this a century ago when he said,
“All beef is grass.” Indeed I say, “All fish is plankton.”

In every environment on land, humanity has worked tirelessly for thousands of years to learn how and to take care of pastures, to keep the grass in abundance, so that livestock could thrive on those pastures. The ocean is not one vast blue environment, it is a seascape made up of countless ocean pastures.

Millions Of Tonnes Of African Dust Crosses The Atlantic 24 June 2014

Those ocean pastures are dying because they rely on dust in the wind to keep the grass, the plankton growing. That dust is just as vital to ocean pastures as rain is to pastures on land. Without it, the ocean pastures become more desert-like. Here’s a link to how this works.

A large part of the crisis for ocean fish is the insistence by so many who live and proselytize by the “donate here button” is that they must have conveniently simple bad guys as targets for their ‘ire for money outrage’. When the real cause of a problem is not “the usual suspects” it is so very much more difficult to be successful trolling “clickbait” in the public pond.

While bad over-fishing does surely take place especially on the last of the fish pastures the real most urgent solution is to restore many fish pastures so that the fishing pressure is spread thin. Not to engage in a fight with the bad guys. But as we know in media of all sorts, “If it bleeds, it leads” and fight stories are far more effective sales pitches than simple solution stories.

The means to BRING THE FISH BACK is now proven, immediately deployable, inexpensive, incredibly speedy, and IT JUST WORKS!

Restore Atlantic ocean cod pastures now. You can find plenty to read on this topic here on my blog, start reading. We can help Mother Nature if we don’t delay, take dust back to her ocean to save the day.

The worst possible scenario for the purveyors of never-ending doomsday and (donate here)… the best possible news for the fish and the whole of the ocean environment.

Join me.