Book Review: Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

Atlantic cod. Public Domain, Link

The fisherman of Newfoundland never thought that the cod stocks could run out. With the benefit of hindsight, their folly seems obvious, but as a fisherman in the 20th century, it would be hard to imagine the extinction of cod. Cod had been plentiful off the coast of Newfoundland since Europeans began fishing it in the 1490s (this book speculates that Europeans--Basques and the British--were fishing in North America before Columbus sailed there in 1491, though this can't be proven). Cod lay 9000 eggs at a time. They had disappeared in certain locations many times before, only to reappear somewhere else. It was not thought that humans could possibly overfish cod to the point of depletion.

The depletion of the Grand Banks (Newfoundland) cod fishery in the late 1980s could be called a black swan event. As someone who was born after the cod fishing moratorium was effected in 1992, reading this book helped me to appreciate just how surprising this was. The most economically important fish of all time, which had for hundreds of years been the main staple of many Europeans’ diets and contributed to the European settlement of North America, was gone.

This passage describes the attitude towards waning cod numbers in the late 1980s:

In reality, catches were increasing not from an abundance of fish but because the efficiency of a modern trawler fleet made it possible to locate the sectors with remaining cod populations and systematically clean them out. In retrospect, this seems obvious, but it must be remembered that during Newfoundland’s long history of fishing, the migratory cod periodically disappeared from certain sectors only to reappear in others. Almost every year that records were kept, there were some areas of Newfoundland or Labrador where the cod stocks had nearly vanished. In some years, only one area failed. The years 1857 and 1874 were notable because there were no failing grounds. In 1868, almost all sectors experienced a failure in the stocks. But they would always show up somewhere the following year. Despite cries of alarm, these failures had never resulted in the disappearance of cod but had only been caused by temporary shifts in migratory patterns, perhaps in response to temperature changes. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the Canadian government assumed that Newfoundland waters were again experiencing this well-known phenomenon.

Some environmental problems have been anticipated in advance by scientists and effective action has been taken to avoid worst-case outcomes. The story of the Newfoundland cod fishery is a good reminder of what can happen when warning signs are ignored.

Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World on Goodreads.