November 16, 2015 — NEW BEDFORD — Gentle persuasion might best describe a new 50-minute documentary on fisheries research going on at the UMass Dartmouth School for Marine Science and Technology.
Don Cuddy, program director for the Center for Sustainable Fisheries and a Mattapoisett resident, provides the narration, taking the viewer aboard the fishing vessel Liberty in May of 2015 to observe fish survey work.
There, one sees footage from eight days at sea, culled from seven hours, of Dr. Kevin Stokesbury of SMAST. He is the researcher who developed the “drop camera” for counting scallops on the sea floor, exposing faulty science, and helped create the highly profitable scallop industry known today.
The New Bedford Whaling Museum is launching the new film, “Counting Fish,” on Harvest of the Sea Day, Nov. 22 at 1:30 p.m. in the museum theater, free to the public.
What viewers will see is a documentary that Cuddy agrees is small, done on a very tight budget.
But without lot of raised voices or a confrontational style, the film depicts SMAST scientists as conducting very serious survey work on fish populations. In between shots of nets being hauled up and fish being hand-counted on deck, Stokesbury and his crew explain carefully and in layman’s terms what they are doing and how they are doing it.