From Hunting Fish to Managing Populations: Fisheries Science and the Destruction of Newfoundland Cod Fisheries

When the first European explorers wrote about the Grand Banks off the island of Newfoundland on Canada's east coast they reported codfish so numerous they choked the passage of vessels. In 1992, fishing trawlers could find no cod on the Grand Banks and officials declared a commercial moratorium on what was once the world's largest scientifically managed ground fishery. Since the moratorium wild cod, fishermen and fishing as a way of life have failed to recover and cod aquaculture has been promoted as a replacement industry. Scientific fisheries management, however, has maintained its legitimacy and continues to dominate national and international policy responses even as wild fish species rapidly decline around the world. In the cod fishery, the result of scientific fisheries management was the destruction of the very object it was designed to protect. The history of scientific fisheries management reveals how this deadly paradox was produced. At the turn of the last century, after 50 years of financial support and encouragement from merchants, governments and fishery investors, German biologist Friedrich Heincke produced a statistical technique allowing the identification of single species fish populations. By the 1930s the scientific world had adopted Heincke's demographic approach as the central paradigm of fisheries research. The demographic paradigm empowered fisheries scientists but marginalized fishermen. It also marginalized empirical knowledge about fish biology, life history traits, and behaviour in favour of aggregated statistical data on idealized single species populations. The idealized mathematical abstractions that form the foundation of scientific fisheries management have proven themselves deadly for fish and fishing people. To solve this tragic history, empirical observations of real fish by fishing people and scientists must again serve as the foundation for how fisheries are studied and organized.