April 10, 2018 — Newspaper headlines in Eastern Canada are reporting northern cod stocks have suffered a significant and surprising decline.

A recent Department of Fisheries, Oceans and Coast Guard (DFO) report revealed cod stocks in the Labrador to Avalon Peninsula dropped 30 percent in 2017 over estimates on the 2015 population.

The decline is significant, scientists studying the fishery agree, but they find fault with reports calling the situation a surprise. It was pretty much predicted by experts, according to Sherrylynn Rowe, a research scientist with the Centre for Fisheries Ecosystems Research at Memorial University in St. John’s.

“Last year, when it became evident that the recent burst of cod productivity had started to slow, my colleague George Rose and I wrote a paper in the journal Nature where we urged the Canadian government not to act on proposals for increased fishery access because we were of the opinion that ramping up the fishery in the face of declining productivity stood to derail the come back that we have seen of late,” Rowe said. “Unfortunately, shortly after that article was published, policymakers opted for a management plan that essentially ignored our pleas, and those by DFO’s own scientists which encouraged keeping removals to the lowest possible levels. Instead, they went ahead and changed the management plan in such a way that allowed removals in 2017 to amount to about three times what they were in 2015.”

This increased the reported catch to 13,000 metric tons in 2017.

Read the full story at Seafood Source