BOSTON, Massachusetts — April 15, 2015 — What happened to the cod? Theories include overfishing (which the fishing industry denies) and climate change. The waters in the Gulf of Maine are getting warmer; the cod, preferring cooler water, could be voting with their fins.
The home of the bean and the cod is running out of the latter, a crisis that could ruin the state's fishermen, imperil its sacred symbol and take the "cod'' out of "scrod.''
Cod once was king in these waters, so plentiful that it drew fishing ships from across the sea. John Winthrop, a founder of Massachusetts Bay Colony, wrote that when he and his fellow Puritans arrived in 1630, in just a few hours, they fish-hooked 67 cod — "most of them very great fish.''
Soon, the fish was an economic mainstay. As the historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote, "Puritan Massachusetts derived her ideals from a sacred book; her wealth and power from the sacred cod." A 5-foot-long, carved wood sculpture called The Sacred Cod has hung in the state House of Representatives chamber since 1784.
Last November, having concluded from tests that the cod population was in free fall, federal officials effectively suspended all cod fishing in the Gulf of Maine east and northeast of here.
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