New reports suggest east coast of Canada cod in recovery

Published: 16 August, 2011

IT was once the richest cod fishing area in the world - until stocks collapsed over 30 years ago.

But new reports from North America suggest the cod population off the East Coast of Canada is showing signs of sustained and serious recovery.

The waters were once so bountiful that in the 1950s British trawlers from Hull and Grimsby would even cross the Atlantic to fish the area.

The journal Nature reports that research shows that the cod and other species of groundfish are making a comeback, although the fishery is still a long way off from what it was a few decades ago.

Professor William Leggett, a professor in the Department of Biology, and an expert in the dynamics of large marine ecosystems said: ""This early-stage recovery represents a long ecological transition for an ecosystem that was pushed out of balance and that is gradually moving back into balance."

The results are being viewed in Canada as encouraging for its east coast communities, which suffered greatly after the cod fishing disappeared and went into near terminal economic decline. Oceanographer Ken Frank says cod, haddock and redfish are showing promising signs of recovery on the Eastern Scotian Shelf since they were wiped out and placed under moratorium in 1993.

Frank, who is a biologist at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Halifax, explained that the number of fish that preyed on those species are decreasing, allowing the vulnerable stocks to increase in biomass.

However, others are urging caution. George Rose, a fisheries scientist at the Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada, said Scotian Shelf is a very small ecosystem, and other areas might not respond in the same way. "It is an interesting story and a very fine use of the data available on the but it does not solve our much bigger problem," he added.

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