The scene is Triton, Newfoundland, on Dec. 14, 2010, and the picture is cod, cod, cod and more cod, as far as the eye of Dennis Smeaton's video camera could see.
Tons of Maritime Canada and New England's founding fish are packed into a tight school, bank to bank in the Triton village cove.
A veteran videographer, Smeaton and his neighbors on the dock, employees of the fish processing plant in Triton, are fascinated but hardly flabbergasted by what they're seeing.
The offshore spawning stock cod biomass for the region is estimated by the Canadian government's 2010 trawl survey to be about 150,000 tons — hundreds of millions of fish — while the inshore stock biomass, including the mass of cod seen in the video, is but a fraction of that amount.
By contrast, in the U.S. waters of the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank, stocks of cod are much stronger and closer to the recognized ideal state of sustainability.
But as the Smeaton video does with pictures — and Legal Sea Foods CEO Roger Berkowitz intends to do with a banquet, featuring cod cheeks and serving nothing but "blacklisted" fish at his Park Square, Boston, restaurant on Jan. 24 — debate remains fierce and scientific disagreement intense over how much fish is out there, and what is a responsible fisheries policy.
The biomass estimate of roughly 150,000 tons of cod in Canadian waters off Newfoundland and the Smeaton video create a context for what "depleted" can means in relative terms for some of the world's historically richest ocean waters.
And it's sparked the push back by Berkowitz against the insistence of some scientists and seafood "eco-labelers" that cod are too fragile a species to be served on responsible tables — or that harvesting causes unacceptable physical harm to the ocean floor.
The case against fishing — or for less fishing — leads directly into the pivotal ocean-food battle centered on the policies of the Obama administration, whose "catch share" fishery management encourages fishermen to buy, sell or trade "shares" of a government-set catch for each stock, as within a commodities market. The result to date has been to consolidate control of fisheries into the hands of fewer, bigger, stronger businesses, while driving out smaller, independent fishermen who don't have the capital to keep up.
Read the complete story from The Gloucester Times.