No cod? Blame the seals!

Why did one of the world's most productive fishing grounds collapse? Why were there seemingly plenty of cod one year and none the next? How come more seals are being killed? The answer is a mix of history, greed and one bad decision after another.

The Newfoundland Grand Banks, off the east coast of Canada, used to be famous as amazingly productive fishing grounds. The first European explorers described the waters as being so full of cod you just had to lower a basket into the water to bring up it up full of cod. In the centuries that followed, abundant fish stocks drew many people to Newfoundland. Small inshore boats took sustainable amounts of cod for centuries up to the 1950s. The bounty of the Grand Banks was enough for local and small-scale fishing and a healthy population of millions of harp seals.

Invasion of the fishing factories

All this changed for the worse during the 1950's and 60's. Technological advances in trawler design and power were modelled on the factory whaling ships that had devastated the last remaining whale populations. These huge factory trawlers came from distant countries attracted by the seemingly endless bounty of the fishery. With huge nets they could hoover up massive quantities of fish, quickly processing and deep-freezing the catch, working around the clock in all but the worst weather conditions. In an hour they can haul up as much as 200 tons of fish, twice as much as a typical 16th century ship would have caught in an entire season.

The cod catch steadily increased to 800,000 tonnes in 1968 but this was the peak of the clearly unsustainable catches. By 1975 the annual catch had fallen by more than 60 percent. Catches of other fish were also plummeting under the relentless fishing pressure. This forced Canada to extend its fishing limit for foreign vessels from 12 miles to 200 miles from its coast.

Thinking big

Rather than using this rule to reduce fishing pressure on the cod the Canadian Government and fishing industry saw a massive cash bonanza - now exclusively for Canadians. Huge investments and government subsides poured into the construction of the same destructive factory trawlers so big money could be made from the cod. In the short term catches rose again and the industry prospered. But beneath the waves the huge trawl nets were not only scooping up cod and anything in their path but the heavy gear was ploughing up the seabed and destroying the delicate ecosystem. The Grand Banks ecosystem was already on borrowed time.

As the cod declined the factory trawlers used powerful sonar and satellite navigation to target the few remaining large shoals of cod, especially during the breeding season when they gather in large numbers. Again short-term expediency was winning out over the long-term health of the fishery.

During the 1980s cod catches remained steady but that was because larger, more powerful and sophisticated vessels were chasing the few remaining fish. Traditional inshore fishermen had already noticed their catches declining but the government preferred to listen to the industrial fishing companies which claimed there was no problem. Scientific warnings in the late 80s went unheeded because any cut in catches would cause politically unacceptable job losses.

By 1992 the levels of Northern cod were the lowest ever measured. The government was forced to close the fishery, throwing 30,000 people out of work and devastating many fishing communities. Despite the ban, stocks have yet to recover and it is uncertain if they will fully recover given the changes wrought on the Grand Banks ecosystem by decades of industrial fishing.

Enter the new villain - seals!

Having overseen and subsidised the destruction of the Grand Banks fishery the Canadian Government now pays out billions of dollars of taxpayers' money in social security to out-of-work fishermen and communities in Newfoundland. Rather than recognise that it caused the collapse of the ecosystem it has been busy looking for a new scapegoat.

Because cod stocks have failed to recover the popular government "common sense" claim is this: it must be because harp seals are eating all the cod and preventing their recovery.

Seals make an expedient target to blame for politicians. The Canadian government increased the seal hunt quota during the 1990's and in 2003 announced both the permanent closure of the cod fishery and a huge increase in the hunt to 350,000 seals.

The simplistic claim that seals eat too many cod is the same flawed argument (whales are eating too much fish) that whaling nations now use to call for the resumption of commercial whaling. Checking a few simple facts exposes this sham. Cod make up only about 3 percent of the average harp seal's diet. That diet also includes species that eat young cod. There is no science to back the claim that seals are preventing the recovery of the cod. In 1995, 97 scientists signed a petition on the subject: "All scientific efforts to find an effect of seal predation on Canadian groundfish stocks have failed to show any impact. Overfishing remains the only scientifically demonstrated conservation problem related to fish stock collapse."

The human greed that caused the collapse of the cod fishery should not be an excuse to start pushing another species in the same ecosystem to dangerously low levels, especially when no one knows for sure what effects this will have.

You don't manage an ecosystem by beating it to death.

Take action:

Sign IFAW's million signature petition against sealing.

More info:

Detailed info on the collapse of the Canadian cod fishery.
Scientific quotes against the misleading seals eat cod argument.
How "Factory Fishing" Decimated Newfoundland Cod.
IFAW's campaign against the Canadian Seal Hunt.