The decline of commercially valuable ground fish stocks is symptomatic of the global, over-fishing crisis. Perhaps no other region on the globe is more illustrative of this crisis than New England (the region that extends from the states of Connecticut and Rhode Island in the south to the state of Maine in the north), whose large-scale, commercial fishing industry goes back 400 years. But from the 1930’s to the 1990’s, most of the commercial fish stocks had been depleted from over-fishing. Currently, bottom feeding lobsters comprise the vast majority of gulf of Maine fishermen “landings”.
A federal law governing the nation’s fisheries, reauthorized in 2007, mandates that a majority of fish stocks be “rebuilt” by 2014–no small challenge–especially given that the same law stipulates that each fishery maintain a “continuous optimum yield.”
According to The New England Fisheries Management Council (which regulates fishing from Connecticut to Maine), 13 of the 19 ground fish stocks, which include halibut, hake, pollock, pout, yellowtail and winter flounders, are currently over-fished, and are still in a major state of decline. The lone exception is the haddock. Further, the good news about haddock is not a small-scale or local phenomenon; of the two major, separate haddock stocks within U.S. waters (one on Georges Bank, one farther north, in the Gulf of Maine), both fisheries are considered “recovered”.
Read the complete story at Eco Worldly.