Sacred Cod, Sustainable Scallops
“It is the same old story. The buffalo is gone; the whale is disappearing; the seal fishery is threatened with destruction. Fish need protection.” Edwin W. Gould, Maine’s fishery commissioner, 1892
Nicholas P. Sullivan
“I am a pirate,” Carlos Rafael once told a group of federal regulators at a Fisheries Management Council meeting. “It’s your job to catch me.” And they did.
Rafael, aka the Codfather, was one of the most successful fishermen on the East Coast. He owned more that 50 boats, both scallopers and ground-fishing vessels, in New Bedford, the #1 value fishing port in the US. All the boats were emblazoned with his trademark “CR.”
In 2016, after an undercover sting, he was arrested on charges of conspiracy and submitting falsified records to the federal government to evade federal fishing quotas. In addition to his boats, the Codfather owned processors and distributors on the docks. When he caught fish subject to strict catch limits, like cod, he would report it as haddock, or some other plentiful species. He got away with it, at least for a while, because he laundered the illegal fish through his own wholesalers, and others at the now defunct Fulton Street Fish Market in New York City.
“We call them something else, it’s simple,” Mr. Rafael told undercover cops who feigned interest in buying his business. “We’ve been doing it for over 30 years.” He described a deal he had going with a New York fish buyer, saying at one point, “You’ll never find a better laundromat.” Caught on tape, the jig was up. In 2018, Rafael, 65, was convicted on 28 counts, including conspiracy, false labeling of fish, bulk cash smuggling, tax evasion and falsifying federal records. CR? Caught red-handed!
The Codfather was sentenced to four years in jail and the Feds impounded his fleet of 40 boats for more than a year, to help compensate for the past sins of overfishing. That cost New Bedford $500,000 a day in lost revenues and 300 jobs in the supply chain, as the port’s catch dropped by 25 percent.
The story of the Codfather, a modern-day, self-professed pirate, is an allegory for the anti-science, wild-capture, fish industry. In New Bedford, where the fishing industry was built on its bountiful cod catch, a successful fisherman illegally catches cod, lies about it, does time, and inflicts harm on the whole fleet.
Meanwhile, the cod have more or less disappeared, like the Anasazi Indians from Mesa Verde — maybe into canyons in the Gulf of Maine, maybe to the Barents Sea around Iceland and Norway, where cod stocks seem stable. Or maybe they have just disappeared after the intense overfishing of the 1970s and 1980s.
In fact, they have been disappearing since the Civil War. Historical records indicate that massive populations of this predominantly bottom-feeding species were targeted by fisheries as early as the 15th century. In 1850, the total biomass of Atlantic cod was approximately 10.2 billion tons, according to in-depth research by the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia, headed by eminent fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly. By 2005, Pauly et al estimated that this biomass had decreased by over 96 percent, or roughly 3.5 percent of its initial value.
Deep-bottom trawlers, which became prevalent after World War II, pierced one of the cod’s protective mechanisms — depth. “Depth was once a vault for the cod, when fishing gear only went down 150 feet or so,” says Pauly. “The cod could duck under that, but not now.”
On top of overfishing, the Gulf of Maine is warming faster than almost any other body of water in the world, which clearly is stressing the whole marine ecosystem. The warm Gulf Stream is extending further up the Atlantic coast, and the cold, nutrient-rich Labrador current from the Arctic is warming as glaciers melt. It just happens that cod was one of the main pieces of the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank ecosystems. “In really warm years, every female cod produces fewer babies than we would expect, and we also see that the young fish are less likely to survive and become adults,” Andrew Pershing, an oceanographer at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, told NPR in 2015.
SHUTDOWN!
Massachusetts and the cod go way back, so the recent disappearance is a blow to the solar plexus for fisherman, many of whose families have lived off the cod for centuries. A painted carving of a “scared cod” has hung in the state house since 1784, when it was said you could walk across Boston Harbor on the backs of cod. Cape Cod got its name from the fish. In 1642, Gloucester was given a charter to profit from the fishing of cod.
Canada and the cod go back even further, 500 years, and Canada is where the downturn was first evident. In-shore small-boat fishermen noticed the cod beginning to disappear in the mid-1980s, but the loss was initially masked by huge offshore catches taken by deepwater bottom trawlers. The government eventually placed a moratorium on cod fishing in 1992, immediately putting 38,000 people in Labrador and Newfoundland out of work. Go into a bar in Labrador today, and within 10 minutes you will hear about the 1992 cod collapse, a searing moment in Canadian history. Today, the moratorium is still in place, although the stock is now rebuilt to 25 percent of 1980’s level.
Overfishing is certainly the primary cause of the decline, but there were other possible explanations for the stock decline. Brian Rothschild, at the time the president of the Center for Sustainable Fisheries, and the former dean of UMASS Dartmouth’s School for Marine Science and Technology (SMAST), noted that in the 1990s the growth rate of individual cod had declined by 50 percent, fish were skinnier than before, and the mortality rate had quadrupled. Clearly, something else was affecting the fish, perhaps nutrition, due to the lower levels of capelin, herring, and mackerel — a food source that has also been scooped up by trawlers with small-mesh nets, which also collect juvenile cod. Perhaps the bottom trawlers have so disturbed the seabed that cod, which spawn at 600 feet deep or more, no longer find it conducive. Perhaps the out-of-control grey seal population, which feast on cod off Georges Bank, has had an effect. And, of course, the warming waters likely reduced reproduction and drove cod to colder waters.
In 1994, the U.S. followed Canada’s suit and shut down two major areas of George’s Bank, a 6,600 square-mile area on the rich continental shelf (shallow submarine plateau) that has long been one of the world’s hallowed fishing grounds. After all, the cod migrate back and forth between US and Canada across the Hague line that marks sovereign waters on the Eastern edge of George’s Bank.
The New England Fishery Management Council, one of eight regional councils in the US that manages fisheries, recommended the closure after scientists said that the fishery could be saved only if fishing of certain species was reduced to zero. The 1993 catch of cod, haddock, and flounder was down 23 percent from the previous year, which itself was a down year. Other changes in management included days-at-sea restrictions, an increase in net mesh sizes (to let juveniles escape), a vessel buyback program (to compensate for the low-cost loans the government issued to buy boats in the ’70s and ‘80s), and trip limits. In addition to cod, fishing for scallops and yellow-tail flounder was also stopped. The flounder stock was dangerously low and the bulk of scallops were dangerously small, many below size.
The fishermen didn’t like this — and fishermen sit on the council. ’’One scientist says one thing and another scientist says something else,’’ Gloucester fisherman Jay Spurling told the Christian Science Monitor. ‘’They’re not even out on the water; they don’t see the things we see. So few people eat fish, and the ocean is so big, I think they’re making a huge mistake.’’
In 2000, the New England Fishery Management Council opened up much of the closed areas, after surveys showed some stock rebuilding. Despite occasional dire warnings, further NOAA surveys as late as 2008 showed that cod populations were stable. It turns out these surveys were inaccurate, as grim new data revealed a few years later. The surveys had been statistically flawed, in a major way. In 2012, NOAA switched from a days-at-sea regulatory regime to a catch-quota regime. That was another dagger in the hearts of fisherman — hunters had seen grounds close and open and close, and then were told when, where, and how much to hunt. Then they were told to take government observers on board — and pay for them!
Finally, in 2014, the US issued its second moratorium on cod fishing. John Bullard, then the Regional Administration of NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries group, appearing at a hearing of the New England Fisheries Management Council, was harangued by fishermen about NOAA surveys that had led to the shutdown. One said, “You lie for a living!” Bullard responded: “You owe me an apology. I’m probably not going to get one, but I deserve one!” Later he said, “Hunters go where the fish are and scientists have sampling protocols [they look for consistent patterns in grids across a large region rather than single sightings]. That’s a recipe for distrust between scientists and fishermen.”
While government scientists and surveys saw cod reduced to 1 percent of their 1980’s biomass, fishermen saw big aggregations, notably right outside Gloucester harbor. Fishermen said the same thing in 1994, when Georges Bank was shut down. Raymond Mayo, a marine biologist for the U.S. Marine Fisheries Service at Woods Hole at the time, called this a perception problem. “You see some cod and assume this is the tip of the iceberg,” he told Mark Kurlansky, author of Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World. “But it could be the whole iceberg.”
“The cod were aggregating, which is what they do when there aren’t many of them left,” says Bullard. They may have been visible in pockets, especially in the Western Gulf of Maine, but they were otherwise scarce. This observation conforms to the Allee effect, first described in the 1930s by its namesake, Warder Clyde Allee, who suggested that aggregation can improve the survival rate of individuals and that cooperation may be crucial in the overall evolution of social structure. At the time, the traditional view of population dynamics was that a population will grow more slowly at a higher density and faster at lower density. But Allee demonstrated that the reverse holds true when a population density is low and under duress. Individuals, he said, often require the assistance of others for more than simple reproductive reasons in order to persist, just as animals hunt or defend against predators as a group.
The US cod catch was worth $118m in 1991; by 2014, it was a mere $9 million. That is the biggest collapse of a fish species in the Atlantic in such a short timeframe in more than 100 years.
ALL IS NOT LOST (THANKS TO THE SCALLOP)
Many in New Bedford — fishermen, politicians, media and the general public — conflated the demise of the Codfather with the demise of the cod itself, a signal that the fleet had hit rock bottom. And it wasn’t just cod; the yellowtail flounder was still in distress. But the mayor thought otherwise.
“Less than 10 percent of the value of the annual landings of the port of New Bedford come from ground fish these days,” New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell said in 2017. “The ground fish industry has contracted significantly on the East Coast, as everybody knows, and what’s left of it is concentrated in New Bedford, but its overall share of the landings in the port are quite small.”
That’s because New Bedford still has the scallop,which was itself going the way of the dodo in the 1990s. If dogfish has replaced cod in the marine ecosystem, scallops have replaced cod in the economic ecosystem — and made New Bedford the most valuable fishing port in the United States for the past 18 years. In 2018, the Port of New Bedford recorded $387 million in landings, 80 percent from scallops; the entire industry, from Cape Hatteras to Canada, is worth $500 million, making it one of the most profitable fisheries in the world. The price of scallops has more than doubled since 2002, ranging from $10-$15 a pound at auction, depending on size. It’s hard to imagine that 20 years ago the scallop grounds were closed and the boats were tied up, just like ground-fish boats today.
The story of scallop success is in many ways the inverse of the cod story. And in many ways it points to a path for the future of fishing. For New Bedford scallopers are reformed hunters. They are not plucking every last scallop off the seabed.They are in cahoots with scientists studying scallops on the seabed. They are now expert and wealthy ranchers, rotating and harvesting scallop beds as if they were moving cows between pastures.
In 1993, after Canada had placed a moratorium on cod fishing, New Bedford (and the Northeast at large) had a different problem: Scallops were hard to find and those that were found were small. After a peak catch of 37 million pounds in 1991, scallop landings along the East Coast plummeted to less than 10 million pounds in 1994. Regulators mandated a maximum of 36.5 scallops per pound, otherwise they were too small. Dredging up immature scallops was certainly not going to help the stock rebuild. But scallopers were scooping up 40 per pound, given the difficulty of actually counting the number of scallops per pound. It was piece work for fishermen.
In 1993, Federal agents wearing bulletproof vests (they had been threatened by fishermen in the past) raided 22 scalloping boats and seized $126,220 worth of scallops. Six boat owners were charged with catching undersized scallops. The industry was on the brink.
Later, at a Fisheries Council meeting to determine how to protect yellowtail flounder, a scalloper blurted out that there were plenty of flounder around: “Every time I go scalloping I catch 30,000 pounds of yellowtail.” That was basically the end of scalloping for a while as astonished Council members moved to close off Georges bank to cod, flounder — and scallops.
“By 1994, we had hit a low point. There was no place to go but up,” said Ronald Smolowitz, a marine scientist and a founder of the Coonamesset Farm Foundation in Falmouth, Mass., which conducts scallop research.
By 1998, shut-down scallopers were desperate to return to their hallowed hunting grounds on George’s Bank. They were still in the hunting mindset, but the most recent National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) survey suggested that scallop abundance was not high.
Enter Kevin Stokesbury, professor of fisheries oceanography at UMASS Dartmouth’s School of Marine Science and Technology (SMAST) in New Bedford, who had been been trialing different methods of counting fish. Working with scallop fishermen, he and his team set out to develop a video survey that would provide “spatially explicit, accurate, precise, absolute estimates of sea scallop density and size distributions along the off-shore northeast waters of the United States including the Georges Bank Closed areas,” as he recounted to Congress during hearings on cod quotas in 2012.
The first small-scale scallop surveys showed rusty-red, market sized scallops highly grouped into patches (beds) of coarse sand-grain-pebble. Some claimed that diffusion caused by saltwater between the camera lens and the scallop would distort the actual size of the scallop, but SMAST had already taken that into consideration by calibrating the camera(s) in a saltwater test tank. “This wasn’t film or movie making, this was nascent cutting-edge science at its best,” says Don Cuddy, a New Bedford waterfront journalist and filmmaker.
The three areas surveyed contained approximately 650 million scallops representing 17,000 metric tons of harvestable scallop meats. New Bedford’s congressman at the time, Barney Frank, a big supporter of the fishery, showed the pictures to William Daley, Secretary of Commerce and overseer of NOAA, which in turn opened up the scallop grounds —but only after the government sent scuba divers down to confirm the SMAST video documentation. That initial SMAST data in 1999–2000 provided an instant increase in harvest of 5.5 million pounds, worth $55 million. By 2001, the fishery was considered “rebuilt.”
In 2003, at the request of the scallop industry (which has contributed $10 million and volunteered boats and captains for the surveys), Stokesbury expanded the video survey to cover the entire scallop resource in US waters. Using pyramidical drop-camera rigs that sit on the ocean floor with three cameras, SMAST estimated 217,520 metric tons of scallop meats (worth approximately US $2.4 billion at the time) — twice that estimated by National Marine Fisheries Service.
The latest SMAST pyramid rig (2019) has hi-res video that is six times sharper than TV resolution, and can identify scallops merely 10mm in diameter. This data is publicly available on a Google-Earth website (see photos above) that allows viewers to click on grids from Carolina to Canada and see the size and density of scallops on the seabed. In a competitive industry, it’s rare that fishermen would want to see their “secret” grounds revealed — but Stokesbury was key to rebuilding their industry by persuading NOAA to re-open grounds in 2000 and has continued to advance their management techniques by providing accurate ongoing visual and statistical data. Using algorithms built on data collected since 1999, SMAST computers can now count the billions of scallops on the sea floor 500 times faster than a human was able to do over the first 10–15 years of surveys.
Further, the collective work has led to new ranch-management techniques: thinning crop to a certain point to allow it to fill in again; limiting days at sea and number of people on a boat; and changing the mesh-size of nets to 4-inch metal rings that allow juveniles to freely flow through.
Charlie Quinn was one of the first in New Bedford to take the risk of dragging for bigger scallops. He said it took him a year to be convinced that leaving the small ones behind would be good for the business. But it was. He went from 264 days at sea harvesting scallops with 3-inch rings, to 31 days at sea with 4-inch rings and 10 times the haul. It took cooperation among gear developers, like himself, researchers such as those at SMAST, Virginia Institute of Marine Science and Coonamessett Farm in East Falmouth, regulators, marketers, buyers and other scallopers, but it changed the fishery.
“The biggest scientific question in fisheries continues to be: What is the relationship between the spawning adults and the new recruits?” says Stokesbury. “I think there are several underlying patterns to recruitment. There seems to be a cycle in scallop populations. There can be a relatively low annual recruitment equal to around 25 percent of the population and then, when the correct environmental conditions occur, a huge year-class.”
This happened in 2003, with a huge recruitment in the mid-Atlantic essentially floated the industry for a decade. Atlantic sea scallops grow to sexual maturity in two years and produce up to 270 million eggs at a time, so the stock can rebuild in a short time. In 2012, video data showed another good recruitment in the mid-Atlantic. With the support of the fishermen, the fisheries council quickly closed the area, protecting the juvenile scallops until they were ready to harvest.
“That is what rebuilds a fishery,” says Stokesbury. “The trick is having the scientific techniques to see the recruitment as soon as it occurs and the management structure in place to act quickly and protect it. It is very hard to rebuild a population with an average annual recruitment.”
Up until 2014, the scallop resource numbered about 8 billion, according to journalist Cuddy. By 2017, with another recruitment year in 2015, the number had soared to 30 billion — or 745 million pounds. The number that would be caught with a 4-inch mesh is roughly 352 million pounds. Let’s see, at $10 a pound for 10–20 scallops (10–20 per pound), that’s $3.5 billion. And there’s no end in sight. The scallop industry — which was distressed, closed, opened, rebuilt, is now back and sustainable — at least until ocean acidification takes a toll on shell building. In 2013, the East Coast scallop industry received a Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) accreditation, the top honor in the industry.
COUNTING COD (IF THEY EXIST)
Given Stokesbury’s success with sea scallops, fisherman are now asking if he can do the same for cod. Yes, that cod, the sacred cod. Can he show the regulators that they are wrong and the fishermen are right — that the cod are still out there?
Over the past five years, Stokesbury has designed a new rig to count fish caught in a trawler net, which is more complicated than placing a camera on the ocean floor.
Two deep-sea cameras (one color, one black-and-white) are affixed at the cod-end of the net, which is usually closed to catch cod (and other fish), but in this case is left open. The video is connected to the captain’s bridge (wheelhouse), allowing observers to see fish as they swim through the net. Software identifies the fish species and counts the fish. The typical fish survey involves hauling fish on board and counting and weighing them one by one, killing most of the fish. Plus, the tow only lasts 20–30 minutes. With the open-net rig, the fish swim out the open end of the net, unharmed. And the net can stay underwater for hours, collecting far more data on the population.
No definitive results are in yet, but the first three tows showed 800 percent more yellowtail flounder than the NOAA surveys! Kyle Cassidy, who works in Stokesbury’s lab, says he once counted 1,200 cod flow through the net in 10 minutes. Now, if that could be replicated over and over, grid by grid, like the scallop surveys have shown, the cod might be back in business.
Just like they are in Iceland.
