Cod return — and they’re hungry
AND THEY’RE EATING INTO CANADA’S SHRIMP INDUSTRY
Theodore Genge has a big beautiful new dragger that’ll be ready to head for “the Labrador” as soon as the sea ice loosens its grip on Anchor Point. When the 63-year-old Newfoundland fisherman began building the $2.2-million trawler two years ago he had 750,000 pounds worth of shrimp quota to catch.
But plummeting shrimp numbers in the cold water off Labrador have led Fisheries and Oceans Canada to drastically carve into quotas for that coast.
Genge expects that by April he’ll be left with a total of 300,000 pounds of quotas — 220,000 pounds in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where there is still plenty of shrimp, and 80,000 pounds on the Labrador coast.
“Right now, yes, it’s pretty stressful — I don’t know whether there’s any hope or no,” said Genge.
“But it’s like this. I started at this fishing when I was 14 years old. There was never a year that looked good before you started. I’ve survived. With fishing, you’ve either got to go in or get out.”
There’s a huge biological change happening on the banks that extend off Newfoundland and Labrador’s northeastern coast. The northern cod are coming back. And they’re eating the shrimp that had taken over their home range off the Labrador coast and northern Grand Banks.
Canada’s cold water shrimp had an export value of $345 million in 2013, making it Canada’s fourth-largest seafood export, behind lobster, Atlantic salmon and snow crab.
This week a House of Commons committee urged the Fisheries Department to begin annual studies of the northern cod population off Newfoundland and Labrador to monitor its recovery. A report by the committee found the cod stocks were showing signs of rebounding after being decimated in the early 1990s.
The return of the once mighty northern cod stock may be a boon for the natural world and, eventually, for the humans who haul them from the sea, process them and eat them.
After all, their disappearance 25 years ago almost killed the east coast fishing industry and seriously maimed the Atlantic provinces.
Now their return brings economic and social upheaval.
GREAT MIGRATION
Theodore Genge was eight when his father, Rufus, rounded Cape Norman in his small wooden boat, aimed for The Black Joke.
It was 1968; Rufus was armed with a weighted hook, a couple hundred fathoms of line and gas and food to last him a few weeks.
The darkly named harbour on the uninhabited Belle Isle is in the strait separating Newfoundland from Labrador.
“Nine miles long by four miles wide and he’s all bare rock and ponds,” said Rufus, now 80. He was heading to meet one of the world’s great migrations.
A few million tonnes of cod, famished from their spring spawning on the offshore banks, were chasing billions of capelin into shore.
“When they get in amongst the capelin, they just gorge themselves,” said George Rose, a former Fisheries and Oceans Canada scientist who literally wrote the book on how man destroyed one of the earth’s greatest wild protein sources.
Cod: The Ecological History of the North Atlantic Fisheries reads like a Shakespearean tragedy, with man’s pride in his own power leading him to destroy one of nature’s greatest gifts.
“Oh yes, they’re coming back on the northeast coast,” said Rose, who retired this year as director of fisheries ecosystem research at Memorial University’s Marine Institute. “Farther south, they’re still in rough shape, but the northern cod was the big one.”
The southern Grand Banks, the Gulf of Maine, Scotian Shelf and Gulf of St. Lawrence are all home to their own cod stocks that have not shown significant signs of recovery since the overfishing of the late 20th century for reasons that are not fully understood.
But the biggest of all the stocks by a wide margin was the northern cod.
For the last decade the northern cod stock has been increasing at a rate of about 30 per cent per year. Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s 2016 stock assessment estimated its total biomass at around 300,000 tonnes.
That’s well short of the million tonnes Fisheries and Oceans has pegged as the size of a healthy resource. But it’s 10 times as many as in 1992, when fisheries minister John Crosbie announced the cod moratorium that resulted in the biggest layoff in Canadian history — an estimated 45,000 jobs.
“If northern cod kept growing at the rate that it has been, we could see a healthy fishery in a few years,” said Rose. “But there’s no guarantees that it will.”
Nobody knows how big the northern cod stock once was. But fishing records tell us that back in 1968, when Rufus Genge made his first trip to Belle Isle, 800,000 tonnes of northern cod were caught. Another 400,000 tonnes were taken from the stocks on the southern Grand Banks. Eighty per cent of that catch was by foreign draggers.
Fishery conservation theory can be compared with banking. The surplus productivity of a fish stock is like the interest generated by an investment. You want to catch the interest.
While catches oscillated between 130,000 and 240,000 tonnes through the 1970s and 1980s, the original capital within the stock was already seriously depleted.
UNIQUE PLATEAU
The cod stocks are the gift of plate tectonics. When North America tore itself from Europe and Africa 200 million years ago, it took some of the Old World with it for its long voyage.
That keepsake is a shallow underwater plateau that stretches for up to 500 kilometres off Newfoundland and Labrador’s east coast.
“It’s monstrous and there’s no other place like it on the planet,” said Rose of the Grand Banks.
Frigid arctic water is pumped south by the Labrador Current toward the Gulf Stream, which pulls up warm waters from the south. The churning of these two currents sends nutrients from the Atlantic’s dark floor up the underwater shoulders of the Grand Banks into the light column.
In a kind of underwater alchemy at 150 metres below sea level, trillions of microscopic plants called plankton harness the sun’s energy to convert the nutrients into biological matter. Then tiny animals called zooplankton feed upon the plants.
There are two directions zooplankton can take to make their way up the food chain on the Grand Banks: through crustaceans like northern shrimp or through the small baitfish capelin.
“You can’t have both,” said Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Halifax’s Dalhousie University. That is to say, you can’t have both a capelin-cod dominated food web and a crustacean-dominated food web on the shelf that extends off Newfoundland.
Cod do eat shrimp. But after going a month without food during the spawning season, what they really need is the capelin that refills their livers to survive the winter to come.
We appear to be headed back to the traditional order of a capelin-cod dominated food chain.
Indeed, the MPs’ fisheries committee is also urging closer monitoring of capelin stocks, as well as limits on seal populations, which prey on both cod and capelin.
FIRST IN, LAST OUT
Shrimp and snow crab like cold water. They don’t like getting eaten by cod.
As cod were driven out of their habitat by cooling water and fishing during the late 1980s, shrimp and snow crab populations bloomed.
A group of Nova Scotia fishing companies started sending draggers north to find the shrimp. From January to April, the trawlers worked in hard weather pioneering a new fishery.
At the beginning, it was highly profitable. The inshore fishermen left with nothing to catch by the cod moratorium wanted in.
In 1997, Fisheries and Oceans granted licences to 360 inshore fishermen.
The companies that pioneered the fishery agreed to the new entrants on the condition that if the quota were ever reduced, it would be done on a policy of “first in, last out.”
A new future for rural Newfoundland and Labrador was created around crustaceans. There were fewer fishermen and plant workers, but it was a higher value industry.
It also required bigger, more expensive boats, travelling farther from shore.
The KMKA Voyager, named for Theodore’s grandchildren, and skippered by his son, Rodney Genge, can travel 400 nautical miles to catch shrimp. Powered by a 914-horsepower diesel engine, the 70-foot boat can haul two trawls.
As the last finishes were being put on the wheelhouse in late spring, Theodore was already worried he’d have to sell it. Northern shrimp stocks are collapsing and everyone in the industry is fighting over what’s left.
To cries of betrayal from industry, Fisheries and Oceans scrapped the first in, last out policy last summer and made the heaviest cuts to the offshore trawler fleet.
Despite retaining 70 per cent of the quota, it’s a smaller pie and even the inshore boats have taken big cuts.
Coming down to visit Theodore aboard the boat that would have dwarfed the small wooden craft he took to Belle Isle 55 years ago, the elder Rufus said, “everyone’s talking about ‘last in first out,’ but I think it’s going to be everyone out.”