November 22, 2014 — There are a lot of fish in the sea. How to count them? It is, surprisingly, one of the hottest questions in New England public life these days.
Massachusetts Governor-elect Charlie Baker, concerned about sharp restrictions on cod fishing in the Gulf of Maine, has openly questioned whether the federal government is accurately tallying the iconic species.
“My continued concern about this,” he said recently, “is there’s only one source of truth.”
And aggrieved fishermen, an iconic species of their own, have argued that the abundant catch in their nets this year belies the government’s warnings of a species on the brink of collapse.
Scientists and environmentalists have offered broad rebuttals to Baker and the fishermen in the news media, often blaming the problem on decades of overfishing. But there has been little detailed discussion of how the federal government actually counts fish and how reliable its numbers are.
The decades-old count, it turns out, is a sprawling effort, overseen by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center, based in Woods Hole.
Observers on fishermen’s boats track what they are catching and where. Analysts pore over catch data filed by dealers at the dock. And samplers at ports inspect a fish ear structure known as the otolith whose calcified rings reveal the age of a fish — just as tree rings show the age of a tree.
Age is important. Scientists say information on how a particular cohort of fish is faring — 1-year-old summer flounder or 5-year-old cod — says something critical about the long-term health of the population.
Read the full story at the Boston Globe