Fishing Disaster :: Environment Ecosystem Environmental Essays

searching DisasterBackgroundThe marine around the rocky shores of Newfoundland were once so full of cod that adventurer John Cabot marveled in 1497 that they virtually blocked his ship. In the centuries to follow, fish became the one and only(a) of the only reasons anyone ever came to Newfoundland, or stayed. Cod was the center of life in the Canadian Maritimes from the beginning. Starting in the 1950s, Huge European trawlers began to travel crossways the Atlantic to fish the waters off Newfoundland. Some refered to these super-ships as Fish Factories. With the increased effort by these distant-water fleets, gain vigores of northern cod increased in the late 1950s and early 1960s and peaked at full over 800,000 tons by 1968. However, by 1975 the Candian Government realized the withering effect this was having on its fish populations and closed its waters to foriegn fishing boats. Although this temporarily staved off the growing crisis, European intervention had changed the na ture of Canadian fishing, pencil lead to the development of Canadian owned super-trawlers. Disaster StrikesThroughout the 1980s, the annual blockage of Canadas northern cod fishing fleet hovered around the 250,000 tonnes mark, as the Canadian government kept promoting more investment. Newfoundlands small-scale, inshore cod fishermen, however, were voicing concerns vast before anyone else that the abundance of the northern cod population was not as healthy as scientists were reporting. Contradictory to scientific data, traditional inshore fishermen in Newfoundland began to notice declining catches before the mid-1980s. By 1986 the scientists also realized that the stock was declining, and by 1988 had recommended the total allowable catch be cut in half. preferably of acting immediately, in a precautionary manner to protect tapering off fish stocks by substantially reducing catch quotas at the start signs of overfishing, the federal government delayed conservation action, choosi ng instead quite check into reductions of the total allowable catch beginning in 1989. It wasnt until 1990, following several(prenominal) years of analysis and re-analysis of data from stock surveys (without simultaneously reducing catch quotas) that the Independent Review of the state of the Northern Cod stock reason that the population, the biomass, the spawning population, and the spawning biomass of the Northern Cod were all in decline and that fishing-related mortality was at dangerously high levels. By 1992, the biomass estimate for northern cod was the utmost ever measured. The Canadian Minister of Fisheries and Oceans had no choice but to give a ban on fishing northern cod.