One that's well worth a look is indeed the idea floated on this very page by Northeast Seafood Coalition Director Jackie Odell, who proposes an "interim catch level" while scientists sort out what can clearly be called almost polar opposite assessment studies.

Another may well be to continue on the same path as the current year — much the same as working on an expired contract — until a badly needed independent survey, with true working commercial fishermen as monitors, can be carried out.

But one approach the council must discard right from the start is the notion — perpetuated, as usual, by NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco — that the council and NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service set any new limits based on a 2011 trawl survey that shows a dire drop in spawning Gulf of Maine cod — a study about which even one of NOAA's own lead scientists, Steve Cadrin, is now skeptical.

Read the complete editorial from The Gloucester Times