Saving Seafood

What lives, what dies? The role of science in the decision to cull seals to save cod

March 16, 2020 — Atlantic cod on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland supported one of the world’s greatest fisheries for over three centuries. Yet this seemingly inexhaustible resource is in bad shape. Some stocks are now endangered and their survival could depend on removing a key predator, the grey seal.

This raises some difficult questions: How do we determine the value of one species over another, and what is the role of science in this conundrum?

My colleagues and I in the Fisheries Economics Research Unit at the University of British Columbia are fascinated by these questions. As an interdisciplinary group of economists, ecologists and social scientists, we commonly attribute values to animals in different ways. But determining whether to kill one animal to preserve another is less straightforward.

The collapse of the Grand Banks fisheries is considered one of the most significant failures in the history of natural resource management — akin to the ongoing degradation of the Amazon — and casts a long shadow over Canadian fisheries management.

Read the full story at The Conversation

MASSACHUSETTS: The oldest surviving Grand Banks fishing schooner is rising once again

June 5, 2017 — Forty-eight pairs of wooden ribs curve upward in a small shipyard on this pine-fringed harbor. Bearded men work with saws, trim oak pieces smooth, and run their fingers along the oiled frame taking shape before them.

The Ernestina-Morrissey, the oldest surviving Grand Banks fishing schooner, is rising once again.

The restoration of the 19th-century vessel, the flagship of Massachusetts since 1983, resurrects a seaworthy ambassador for the state and a floating classroom that can teach students ranging from kindergartners to cadets at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy.

The $6.3 million project also represents a victory for historical preservation, one that could keep the schooner sailing well past 150 years since its launching in 1894 at the James and Tarr Shipyard in Essex, Mass.

“Something like this doesn’t come around too often in one’s lifetime,” said Eric Graves, president of the Boothbay Harbor Shipyard, a waterfront workplace even older than the two-masted schooner being rebuilt from the keel up.

The schooner is undergoing a carefully crafted, labor-intensive overhaul that began in 2015 and might not be completed until early 2019, said David Short, the lead shipwright on the project.

Old frames and planks are being removed and new ones installed, including Danish white oak from a royal forest that long served Denmark’s navy. When Short and his crew are finished, nothing will remain of the original 114-foot schooner except “her name and her history,” he said.

But the ship that returns to the sea will be an exacting replica of the sleek and sturdy schooner that fished the Grand Banks out of Gloucester and Newfoundland, later explored the Arctic, and finally was used to bring Cape Verde immigrants to the United States as late as 1965.

That trans-Atlantic legacy is one that Licy Do Canto, a Roxbury native whose grandmother emigrated aboard the schooner in the early 1950s, wants preserved as a testament to the dreams and struggles of all generations who have traveled to the United States in search of a better life.

The homes of many Cape Verdean immigrants in Massachusetts contained two photographs, Do Canto said: one of President John F. Kennedy and one of this schooner. Do Canto envisions a future where the schooner is able to cross the Atlantic once again and revisit Cape Verde.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe