Do oceans have a fighting chance of recovery?
What are we to make of this? Reason for hope? An anomaly? A miracle?
Baffled scientists at Oceana, a major international oceans think tank, call it “the inexplicable rise of redfish in Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence.”
Redfish were, like cod, wiped out by overfishing by the mid-1990s, when the fishery was closed. Nothing much happened until 201113, when there was a massive one-time hatch, with the result that there’s now an estimated stock of a staggering two million tonnes nearing commercial size of this slowgrowing species.
The first question is how to fish it without ruining it again, having learned our hard lesson. However, it tickles a larger question: does it allow us to hope that things are maybe turning for the better in world fisheries generally?
The United Nations tentatively thinks so. It has a plan for 2030 in which “capture fisheries” (as opposed to aquaculture) is projected to recover somewhat thanks to “improved resource management” and “reduced discards, waste and losses.”
True, “the fishing resource continues to decline due to overfishing, poor management and other factors,” says the UN, “but the number of landings from biologically sustainable stocks is on the rise.” And so “effective fisheries management has been proven to successfully rebuild stocks and increase catches.”
Is there reason for optimism here, or is it more like an uptick amid catastrophe, like a three-day truce in Gaza?
The bleak story is still the dominant one. Some 80 per cent of the world’s fisheries are either fully exploited, over exploited or depleted; some species are on the brink of extinction; there are huge polluted dead zones; an oversubsidized world fishing fleet is considered two-and-a-half times too big for the job; there’s a criminal “dark fishery” that the World Wildlife Fund estimates might account for 30 per cent of the catch of high-value species; more plastic than fish in the ocean is projected by 2050 at current rates. And on and on.
A big part of the bleak story involves China, with a predatory fleet that is part of its world domination plans. Some of these ships have a paramilitary function — that is, to take over ocean territory from its South Asian neighbours.
With an estimated 6,500 long-distance vessels (the entire EU has only some 300, as does the U.S., and Canada fewer than 100) and some 95 fishing terminals in foreign ports, it accounts for about a third of the world’s high-seas fishing capacity and is accused of being the world’s largest perpetrator of illegal fishing (while legal rights groups charge that these ships are nests of human rights abuses, mainly against non-chinese Asian crew).
Closer to home, the bleakness persists. Mackerel stocks have recently collapsed, while herring may be heading in the same direction. Elvers (baby eels for the Asian growout trade) are under a withering criminal assault that the fisheries authorities seem unable to stop. Since I moved to the Yarmouth area from Halifax some 20 years ago, the smelt and frost fish have disappeared from here along with the ice. The lobster stocks seem to be diminishing in these southern parts, too, although increasing in the north.
Still, one fish has perked up and I have to indeed credit “effective fisheries management” — that is, a clampdown on excessive fishing.
When the gaspereau were declining a few years ago, Fisheries and Oceans Canada restricted fishing days from Friday at 8 a.m. to Monday at 8 a.m. The fish were free to head for the spawning lakes the rest of the time. In the last few years, they’ve been coming up in probably the hundreds of thousands in, among other places, my local gaspereau brook, not much wider in places than a dip net.
Back in 2006, Dalhousie marine ecologist Boris Worm and his team rattled ocean thinking worldwide with a study based on computer models that predicted the end of fishable ocean stocks by 2048. In a more recent opinion, he said much had changed since 2006. Although the overfishing continues, there’s pushback that he could hardly have imagined at the time, notably with the increasing use of conservation zones. We’ve given ourselves a “fighting chance,” he said, “to restore what has been lost.”
As for the redfish, Fisheries and Oceans is taking a slow approach that has the approval of even usually critical ecology groups. The plan is to roll out a modest fishery over the next couple of years while figuring out how to fish it while not damaging other fish, including a related species of redfish that lives deeper and has not recovered.
Interesting questions remain. Since this hatch occurred only once in 30 years, will it happen again, or is this it? Could it happen with other species, notably cod? Why does it happen? What is the role of climate change?
Perhaps one large lesson to be learned is that despite our science, we know nothing. We can measure the ups and downs of biological life, but that’s it. The bigger lesson, if we can keep it, is to restrain our destructive impulses.