October 31, 2019 — Dramatic reductions in Atlantic cod catch limits in the US Gulf of Maine have taken a psychological toll as much as a financial one on New England’s fishing captains, reports a six-year study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Using a repeated cross-sectional survey, researchers at Northeastern University, in Boston, Massachusetts, led by Steven Scyphers, an assistant professor of marine and environmental sciences, said they found that 62% of the captains they studied self-reported “severe or moderate psychological distress one year after the crisis began and patterns that persisted for five years,” according to an abstract of the study, titled “Chronic social disruption following a systemic fishery failure”.
“Distress was most severe among individuals without income diversity and those with dependents in the household,” the researchers added.
It was in December of 2011, five days before Christmas, that cod fishermen in the Gulf of Maine received a letter from regulatory officials telling them that new assessments showed the New England cod stocks were not going to recover by 2014, as had previously been expected, recounts a university magazine article about the study. Catch limits were then decreased by more than 95% over the next four years.