Given the implications for Gloucester and New England's other fishing communities, it's essential that the purported new data showing a dire decline in the Gulf of Maine cod stocks undergo the kind of independent peer review for which it's scheduled beginning later this week.
And to that end, Steve Cadrin, a University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth scientist who worked with the new data, deserves credit for noting that substantial changes can be made during that process.
Let's face it, despite Cadrin's and others' best efforts, NOAA's trawling science and data collection simply does not have a credible recent history. And if the new cod figures can somehow be confirmed, it will mostly just show that NOAA's own 2008 data showing the cod stocks had largely been rebuilt were grossly off as well — in fact, by indicating that the amount of spawning in the Gulf of Maine cod may have somehow been nearly triple the actual amount.
But in the course of this and other reviews — and certainly before the agenda-driven NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco and other fed fishing officials put any new clamps on fishermen and what is arguably New England's most important species — it's absolutely critical that they provide full accounting of the trawling survey, including all aspects of the boat, the netting, the locations of the trawls and other information that have clouded these efforts in the past.
Read the complete editorial in The Gloucester Times