May 19, 2014 — Cod fishing in New England has steadily declined over the past three decades. It’s estimated that hundreds of people have lost their jobs as a result and that continued failure to rebuild the fishery could cost the region’s economy a total of $200 million, according to the New England Fishery Management Council.
But the big concern is really one of culture, according to Northeastern’s Jon Grabowski. “You’re talking about an iconic fishery. Cod has been fished in these waters going back hundreds and hundreds of years,” said Grabowski, an associate professor of marine and environmental science at the university’s Marine Science Center in Nahant, Massachusetts. “You can go back a thousand years to the Basques coming over to fish these historically really productive grounds,” he said.
Grabowski, has been working with other fisheries scientists as well as economists, social scientists, and policy makers to determine the best strategies for dealing with the all of the Northeast region’s fisheries that impact habitat, which includes cod, haddock, cusk, scallops, clams and other fish that live near the sea floor and are of significant socioeconomic value to the region.
In the first of a series of research articles produced by the PDT, Grabowski and his colleagues examine the vulnerability of groundfish habitats to various types of fishing gear. “We reviewed how all the different geological and biological components of habitat are affected by these different types of gear,” Grabowski said. The committee examined how easily these habitats can be damaged and how long it takes for them to recover.
They found that mobile fishing gear such as trawls and dredges that drag along the bottom cause more damage to areas inhabited by groundfish than stationary gear like traps and gillnets. They also found that larger geological features, such as cobble and boulders, are more susceptible to damage and take longer to recover than sand and mud—after all, some of these geological features have taken millennia to form.
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