"It is quite possible that both surveys were right and that something happened in the ocean," federal fisheries administrator Eric Schwaab said in a radio interview.

However, Schwaab also acknowledged that the likelihood that 22 million tons of spawning age Gulf of Maine cod had vanished between a study that showed the stock as healthy in 2008 and the more recent survey released in early December was "out of the norm."

Schwaab did not speculate about what might have happened to the cod, a fish that represents upward of 60 percent of the income for the fleet of 60 to 100 Gloucester based boats, according to Vito Giacalone, policy director for the Northeast Seafood Coalition and whose three sons own one of the port's fish auctions.

Read the complete story from The Gloucester Times.

Listen to the Saving Seafood Radio Show with Eric Schwaab.