And of course no one is sure quite why the cod haven’t recovered, which makes it hard to solve the problem.
I have heard speculation from a fish population ecologist that the ecosystem there has shifted to a new, low-cod equilibrium. The idea is, there are intermediate-size fish (capelines) now which eat cod eggs and prevent the cod from recovering. Back in the day, the cod would eat the capelin and keep their population in check, but now there’s really no way for the cod population to recover in the presence of large number of capelin.
I don’t know how well that is backed up by evidence.
There’s also claims that “seals eat all the cod” and “the ecosystem has changed with global warming, the melting Greenland icecap has changed the subtle balance of the Labrador straight, gulf, and Grand Banks and it’s less friendly to cod breeding”. All hand-waving to try to explain, rather than based on demonstrable effects.
Actually if you read Farley Mowat’s book, the cod catch began declining in the 1970’s. As each year the catch failed to meet quota, the Fisheries decided “the fish are disappearing” but due to political pressure, still allocated quotas above what the previous year’s harvest was. Also, no serious effort was made to control European misbehaviour until it was too late.
The sad thing is, this was a resource that a single country was capable and authorized to manage. the though is that once the high seas or disputed seas are involved, it may be even more difficult to police.
And the list goes on - there have been serious concerns about West Coast salmon for decades. The question is, what’s doing them in? Is it destruction of their spawning grounds in the rivers of the Rockies through development and pollution? Overfishing when they are running upstream? Being scooped up in the high seas before they make it home to spawn? The latter problem would mean all the local measures still wouldn’t help.
Mostly, the Passenger Pigeon was driven into extinction by habitat destruction. (Dont get me wrong, massive hunting certainly helped) It was also a odd species that apparently wouldnt breed unless there were zillions around.
At the time of it’s “discovery” the Steller’s sea cow was already on the edge. Likely there were fewer than 1500, in a small area. Mind you, it’s quite possible that the native hunting brought the Steller’s sea cow down to that limited area and number.
Note that seafood in 2014 is much more expensive than it was when I was a kid back in the 70s. My mom used to feed us cheap frozen fishsticks regularly. Last time I checked the frozen food aisle I was shocked at how much more expensive fishsticks were than comparable chicken nuggets. Or check the fresh seafood aisle compared to the beef, pork or chicken. Fish used to be cheap food for poor people, now it is an expensive luxury food.
This I believe is the best way of summing it up. What most of the ‘prices will rise to save the day’ posters seem to be missing is that like all technology that in fish-catching continously improves (meaning higher catches for a given effort), and that higher consumer prices also mean higher revenue to fish-catchers, offsetting increases in required effort. Also, as fish get harder to catch the less modern and effective boats get taken out of the equation as non-economic, concentrating revenues in fewer and fewer highly productive modern vessels.
So you could find that even if a given fish were 50x harder to catch in 2025 than they are today (due to scarcity) there might still be a few boats out there profitably taking large-ish catches at a rate marginally faster than replacement, and supply/demand balancing out at a price level that is expensive but still affordable as a treat (at the same level as fillet steak, maybe).
For example bluefin tuna is not really unaffordably expensive yet, but it is well on the way to complete collapse - and it is profitable for some fishing boats to go looking for them using helicopters in addition to the usual radar/sonar etc., despite helicopters on boats being very much not cheap. By 2030 probabably every modern vessel will have a UAV providing the same or better capability for a fraction of the cost, and maybe even a ROV to help them set/inspect the nets.
Farmed seafood isn’t that much of a solution either. Firstly they are almost all fed on seafood, so all the desireable wild species will not only be fished to exhaustion, but will also have to compete for their food with industrial trawlers supplying the fishmeal industry. Secondly farmed fish are very concentrated and thereby generate high levels of species-specific parasites/diseases - these are controlled with chemicals in the farmed fish but wild fish coming into the general area will get heavily infested/infected and have no-one dosing them. The treatment chemicals also have undersireable spillover effect on e.g. invertebrates, which in turn are critical to local birds, non-fishery sealife, etc.
In my opinion, without radical change seafood as it exists today is pretty much doomed. In future people will still eat animals grown in water, but the vast majority of ‘seafood’ will be garbage compared to what we have available today, in the same way that nowadays we enthuse about seafood our grandparents would have regarded as only fit for the cat.
A little thought experiment for you. What do you think the deer population would be like five years after you changed the rules so that any individual of any age or residency could take as many deer as they liked, of any age or kind, using any method whatsoever, 365 days a year, and (if they wish) sell their ‘catch’ without any controls or inspection to anyone they chose? Because that would roughly parallel the situation in most fisheries.
My WAG is that the deer would be essentially wiped out well before the 5 years were up, and I doubt total venison production in maryland even during the completely unsustainable ‘peak catch’ would be more than a tiny fraction of Maryland beef production - because as a general rule ‘from the wild’ production just doesn’t scale to the level of human population.