Cod Wars

It's not only the Chesapeake where user groups and the regulators disagree as to the health of the fish stocks.  In the north along the Gulf of Maine, commercial fishermen think the cod are doing fine, while the fisheries managers think that the stocks are in trouble, and would like to impose severe restrictions or a moratorium:

Federal regulators are considering the unthinkable in New England: severely restricting — maybe even shutting down — cod fishing in the Gulf of Maine, from north of Cape Cod clear up to Canada. New data suggest that the status of the humble fish that has sustained the region for centuries is much worse than previously thought.

Fishermen insist that there are plenty of cod and that the real problem is fuzzy science. They say the data are grossly inconsistent, pointing to a 2008 federal report that concluded that Gulf of Maine cod, though historically overfished, were well on the way to recovery.

Trouble is, one of them has to be wrong.  Betting from a historical perspective alone, I predict that the regulators will be proven correct and that the stocks are in serious trouble.

“Fishermen will almost always tell you that, and it’s not that they’re lying,” said Mark Kurlansky, whose 1997 book, “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World,” documented how Canada’s once-abundant Atlantic cod were fished almost to extinction. “Landing a lot of fish can mean the fish are very plentiful, or it can mean the fishermen are extremely efficient in scooping up every last one of them.”

Fishermen are born optimists, at least about fish.