This, then, puts a lot of pressure on the second question—how many fish are there? Finding the answer is much trickier. No one really quite knows how many fish there are and, more important for the future, how many fish there could be. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), a kind of database of databases that compiles all the fisheries information from all the governments in the world, wrote in its most recent assessment of global fish stocks that “the overall state of exploitation of the world’s marine fishery resources has tended to remain relatively stable. . . . Over the past 10-15 years, the proportion of overexploited and depleted stocks has remained unchanged.”
And yet this assessment of stability is up for question. The FAO fact-checks and audits its findings but admits that despite its efforts, its “fishery data are not fully reliable.” The FAO also notes a “spreading of over-intensive fishing from the northern to the southern hemisphere” and has provided “a consistent warning . . . about the consequences [of overfishing] for the overall sustainability of the global fishery system.”
Nowhere is the stress on abundance more acute than with cod and the other whitefish that are used as “industrial fish”—the raw material for fast food and frozen supermarket meals. Whitefish today represent about a fifth of the world catch, or the whole human weight of the United States. They are principally animals of the order Gadiformes, cod being the most famous example of that order. But haddock, hake, pollock, and other gadiforms are increasingly folded into the mix. In Northern European countries, particularly the United Kingdom, cod and other whitefish represent the most-consumed fish in the national diet, making up nearly a third of all the seafood Brits eat, both as cheap fast food and as more expensive fresh fillets.
The popularity of gadiforms is greatly aided by their morphology generally. Gadiforms live a lazy life, preferring to move slowly in chilly water. Their flesh therefore often contains a minimum of high-speed muscle tissue—tissue that is usually contained within the blood line that runs down the length of the fish’s fillet. Because the size of a fish’s bloodline contributes to its “fishy” flavor, cod do not taste very fishy. Cod also have a tendency to store oil in their liver rather than in their flesh. Since oil in the flesh determines the speed at which flesh putrifies when frozen or dried, cod and other gadiforms can be stored for great lengths of time. Gadiforms are therefore the perfect industrial fish: they are common, mild, and easily recast as different kinds of food products. Whether used as dried bacalao to feed slaves on southern plantations in the nineteenth century or as fish sticks to feed working families in the modern era, gadiforms should be—in a healthy marine ecosystem anyway—so plentiful that they shouldn’t seem special in the least. They are the true everyman’s fish.
Gadiforms’ wide use as industrial fish also stems from the fact that they are available in waters of
both
hemispheres. Generally, animals that evolve in a cold-water ecosystem end up confined to a single half of the globe, because once they have adapted to cold conditions, warm equatorial climates are deadly and act as a kind of prison wall, effectively sealing off passage from one pole to another. It is for this reason that penguins are found only in the Southern Hemisphere and puffins only in the North.
Gadiforms, though, are older than the hemispheres as we know them. The ur-gadiform is thought to be something found in fossil form in the North Sea, called
Sphenocephalus.
Modern gadiforms evolved from the extinct genus
Sphenocephalus
and radiated out to the Southern Hemisphere at a time when the continents were more unified and a bridge of frigid currents allowed cold-water fish to cross the equator. But approximately 45 million years ago, Australia broke away from Antarctica during the Eocene epoch, and a powerful whirl of water took shape that whipped around newly isolated Antarctica. This shunt, called the Circum-Antarctic Current, continues to spin at the bottom of the world today; it effectively walled off large populations of Southern gadiforms from their Northern cousins. These Southern gadiforms are only now coming under intense exploitation, but more about that later.
Over the eons certain gadiforms, cod being the best example, developed an approach to life that grabbed every opportunity to become more numerous and then in turn used that abundance to perpetuate abundance over time. More sedentary fish that do not migrate broadly must content themselves with the biological energy available in their immediate environment. The sun can transmit only so much energy into a given square mile of sea, and that energy in turn can result in only a certain amount of plankton calories that are in turn passed up the food chain. But codfish travel far and wide and are highly omnivorous. Before human intervention the many ecosystems they traversed allowed them to build up extremely large populations.
Whenever there is food energy available in a system, there is competition from multiple species for that energy. Cod bucked this competition by outright numerical dominance, managing over time to monopolize much of the energy pathways of the North Atlantic. The most analogous example to cod would be the Douglas fir, cedar, and redwood forests that came to dominate over other plants in the Pacific Northwest. Just as tens of millions of huge redwoods and Douglas fir trees spanned western North America from San Francisco to British Columbia and formed dense ceilings that blocked out all light and suppressed other tree species, so, too, did the vast schools of cod form a kind of predatory canopy over the continental shelves around North America and Europe. On Canada’s Grand Banks, codfish regularly reached five feet in length and weighed upward of a hundred pounds. Crabs, lobsters, mackerel, and other creatures that might have preyed on smaller, more vulnerable cod when they were first hatched were kept at low levels by the gape-mouthed, marauding hordes of big bad cod that monopolized the most productive swaths of current.
Of course, with the advent of industrial factory fishing, a different kind of ecology was established, one where the climax community that came to dominate the continental shelf was not a fish of the order Gadiformes but rather a hominid of the order Primates. And though there is no 100 percent provable scientific correlation between the rise of man and the fall of fish, it is instructive to muse on the inversion. According to Jeff Hutchings, who studies historical cod abundance at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, the total cod population of Canada’s most famous grounds was even greater than that of the American buffalo, and the decline of cod represents the greatest loss of a vertebrate in Canadian history—somewhere on the order of 2 billion individuals. “What’s the equivalent loss in human weight of two billion cod?” Hutchings wondered aloud. “That’s twenty-seven million people.” After speaking with Hutchings, I cast around for a nation that had a population of around 27 million people—fishing for a good metaphor, so to speak. Ironically, a country that has a pretty close equivalent in human biomass to the lost Canadian cod biomass is Canada.
What happens to a climax marine ecosystem, then, when the climax animal is taken from the water and turned into seafood? With fisheries the result is dependent on the extent of the removal. Hutchings’s research has found that a removal of 70 percent to 80 percent of a fish population has a certain degree of reversibility. In a case where 20 percent or 30 percent of fish are still in the water, the population may be unstable and vulnerable but still has reasonable potential for recovery. Also, the genome of the stock—that is, the sum of the genetic diversity of the population as a whole—is not likely to have been heavily depleted; there are still nearly as many genes that account for a healthy amount of variability that will enable population recovery over time.
But when removals slip upward to 90 percent or more, the chances of recovery diminish and it is possible that the genome itself may be affected. In the fifteen years since the Grand Banks were closed, where total removals exceeded 95 percent of the historical cod population, a noted decrease in the size of the average codfish has been observed. Instead of averaging twenty-odd pounds as they did when the climax community was still in place in the 1960s, the average cod is now about three pounds—“scrod” size, as fish marketers like to call cod that produce a pan-size fillet. Furthermore, even after the Canadian government instituted a total closure of the Grand Banks in 1992 followed by severely restricted fishing later in the decade, codfish abundance has not shown signs of significant increase.
What this suggests is that by catching all the big cod, fishermen have in a sense selected for small cod. The genes for small cod may now be more frequent in the overall cod genome than they were before fishing pressure was applied. Even if cod on the Grand Banks were left alone, it might take many decades for the population to recover its previous genetic potential and reclaim the average size required for dominance.
The collapse of the Grand Banks cod was, for the years preceding Mark Kurlansky’s
Cod,
a local problem of the Canadian Maritime Provinces. It prompted hand-wringing on the part of Canadian officials and would get coverage on occasion from the national Canadian press and from newspapers in the cod-eating countries of Northern Europe. But when the cod crisis spread to the United States, the issue became a global metaphor. The loss of abundance, when it happens in front of your face, is a shocking thing, especially when that thing is such an important food source to so many working-class people.
But cod present an interesting twist on the old model of threatened-species recovery. Both humans and codfish require
extreme abundance
of codfish for their continued prosperity. At the world’s present rate of consumption, humanity needs about 40 billion pounds of codlike fish annually, more or less the size of the entire Grand Banks codfish population at its highest recorded level ever,
every single year.
And by the late 1990s, it had already become apparent that some drastic measures had to be taken to try to restore the abundance of cod. In the period between 1962, when codfish stocks were still healthy and menu items like McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwich were invented and produced at a cost of less than twenty-five cents a sandwich, and 1994, when most cod stocks were considered “collapsed” (collapsed generally being defined as a state where 90 percent or more of the historical population is gone), the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom all went from being net exporters to net importers of not just cod but all fish.
The problem then becomes much more complex than dealing with an endangered species like, say, wolves, where there is no longer any harvest pressure. There may be arguments about how many wolves we want, but there is no “wolf industry,” waiting, guns in hand, to pick them off if the population reaches harvestable size. How do you restore an ecology of abundance when even the diminished system is still being plundered by humans? And how do you do this when you must reestablish the dominance of a fish that has been not just turned into a second-stringer but genetically demoted into a fragment of its former self? A tough job indeed.
But not impossible.
To begin with, it is important to note that even though all cod populations in the world are technically a single species that can interbreed, different populations of cod have different prospects for the future, depending on how much they have been exploited and how well they are reproducing. You cannot say, “Cod are endangered because the Grand Banks cod have collapsed,” any more than you can say, “Humanity is starving because the Sudanese don’t have enough to eat.” Correspondingly, there is no “global cod solution” that will save every cod stock in the world.
There are, however, basic human mistakes, fundamental misapprehensions of the potential of natural systems that point out just how primitive and ignorant we continue to be in our relationship with wild fish. And as it happens, one of the most important places where this ignorance was brought under the bright light of rational science was Georges Bank, the place from where I had extracted two dozen codfish in 2008 and where Mark Kurlansky concluded his book about cod in 1998.
O
verfishing” is a term that is used widely in the press today. Those who follow fish have the impression that it is a stable and accepted concept within the scientific community. But even though the ocean clearly has some kind of limit to the total amount of fish that can be removed, until relatively recently no government agency was willing to go on record as defining what overfishing meant in general and which fish specifically were overfished. It was only in the 1990s, while scientists and policy makers were hashing over the question of Georges Bank codfish, that the concept of overfishing finally stepped into the ring to fight against the forces of ignorance.
Professor Andy Rosenberg, an ecologist at the University of New Hampshire, had a ringside seat to the fight. Though he started out as someone destined for a place up in the bleachers of academia, he got his Ph.D. in Nova Scotia just as the Grand Banks crisis was unfolding. The lessons he learned there prompted him to apply to be part of the American fisheries management system just as the American cod crisis was coming to a head. Fisheries in the United States are regulated by a series of regional management councils (FMCs, in fisheries parlance) that are by law a mix of representatives of the fishing industry and qualified scientists. Historically, it is the fishermen who have decided what is and isn’t “sustainable,” and science generally served as a means of supporting fishermen’s claims. But in 1994, when Rosenberg applied for (and to his surprise was given) the directorship of the FMC that oversaw New England cod just as New England cod were about to plummet into extirpation, the rules of the game had begun to change.
“By the beginning of the 1990s, it was pretty clear there had been some good codfish reproduction in 1989. And to a lot of people it looked like the Georges Bank codfish’s last gasp,” Rosenberg told me. “The advice from the scientific community was that you really had an opportunity with this last good burst of fish to take some strong management action and put the fishery on stable ground.” Action, however, wasn’t taken. Not until a nonprofit organization called the Conservation Wildlife Fund sued the federal government for not fulfilling its duty to protect fish stocks. “And at this point the government did something extraordinary,” Rosenberg recalls. “They said, ‘You’re right, we haven’t met our responsibility. Our own science agrees.’”