In this 24-hour news cycle, social media-obsessed world, all industries have their buzzwords.
A quick look at Twitter will instantly tell you what words are trending at that very moment in time.
Buzzwords surrounding today’s modern fishery now include such terms as sustainability, ecofriendly, ecolabelling, chain of custody and traceability, to name a few.
However, if you venture back in time a few decades, prior to the onslaught of Facebook and YouTube, one will discover that the buzzwords of that day were very different than those trending online today.
In the latter days of the 20th century, the fishery in this region was encompassed by a very ominous cloud. Words such as overfishing, moratorium, stock collapse and crisis were on almost everyone’s lips when discussing the fishery.
Anyone reading this does not need a history lesson as to what was happening with the fishery of the day. For the most part, the fishing industry in Atlantic Canada was in basic survival mode after many commercial stocks failed or were in dire trouble, including the collapse of the cod fishery in the northwest Atlantic.
While many at the time claimed to have seen this industry trend coming, it still landed with a sudden, catastrophic thud, throwing thousands out of work, decimating many rural Atlantic Canadian economies, which, in turn, led to an massive population outmigration to other parts of the country.
The question remains, like it did 28 years ago, is there a better way of predicting such collapses before they happen? Eric Pedersen thinks there is.
As the Atlantic Canadian fishery tackles the latest crisis, the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, Pedersen, a Concordia University biology professor, is focused on how to help the industry, now and into the future.
“One of the things that can make fishing a difficult profession is the inherent uncertainty of the availability of fish stocks. The abundance of any single species can change quite a bit from one year to the next and the kinds of regime shifts that I study can lead to even larger and longer-lasting shifts that are difficult to predict,” Pedersen explained in a recent interview.
For those who experienced the 1990s collapse of the cod fishery, life was very hard. The government moratorium put tens of thousands out of work and had a catastrophic effect on the regional economy.
At the time, the common perception was that overfishing had caused the crisis. But what if there were other factors? This is where Pederson comes in.
“We propose a new approach to characterize community regime shifts,” he explained.
Regime shifts or changes are defined as rapid ecosystem shifts, punctuating longer periods of lower variability in which the fish populations were stable enough to track and record.
He has been investigating this issue through his Quantitative Fisheries Ecology Lab for two and a half years. He and his research team work in partnership with Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO).
Pedersen and his colleagues have explored how numerous maritime wildlife populations, from fish to lobster, have changed over the years. His results? The cod collapse appears to have happened much earlier than previously believed.
“It began in the 1980s, if not before,” Pedersen said. “Things were never static. This means that fish populations thought to be previously stable were actually always in flux.”
This conclusion backs up the claims of many harvesters of the day that were saying that the cod were disappearing for years — only for their pleas to fall on deaf ears.
By monitoring these regime factors, Pederson feels species collapses could potentially be averted.
In tracking species to predict regime shifts, he noted that it is possible to not only anticipate when one species is at risk of decline, but also when a species may be headed for a boom.
Both of these factors are important for the fishing industry to plan for the future.
The traditional approach to fisheries management has been to study one species at a time. But new research, similar to what is being undertaken at Concordia University, is proving the old way may not be the most effective way.
“When we study fish, we need to find a way to measure what that species is eating, what is eating it and then the whole system around it. We want a simple metric to explain all these groups and how they are changing together,” Pedersen explained.
This approach to fisheries science is not new. Some stakeholders have been arguing for years that the best way to study fish stocks is to analyze the entire ecosystem in which they live. Basically, fish cohabitate with other fish, so you need to study everything living in a specific area.
A modern-day example of this is the explosion of the two redfish species (sebastes mentella and sebastes fasciatus) in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
This fishery has been under moratorium since the 1990s because the biomass of the two redfish species combined only averaged 15 per cent of the total biomass of all captured organisms in research surveys conducted by federal fisheries scientists between 1995 and 2012.
However, the 2019 research survey conducted by DFO in the Estuary and northern Gulf of St. Lawrence showed that the biomass of the two redfish species combined accounted for 90 per cent of the total biomass of all captured organisms.
In fact, the total biomass of S. mentella is estimated at 4,365,000 tonnes, the highest value observed in the time series since 1984. Of that amount, 3,044,000 tonnes were of fish larger than the 22-cm minimum regulatory size and 497,000 tonnes for fish larger than 25 cm.
While this massive redfish population shift may lead to revitalized commercial fishery in the near future, what impact is it having on other valuable species, such as shrimp?
Given our past experience, it is prudent that all aspects of modern fisheries science be given the light of day and that all groups working collaboratively will serve the industry best.
Pedersen summed it up best when he said, “there are only so many levers we can pull, but the goal is to use this research to predict and prevent a bad surprise.”
And nobody in this industry wants to witness yet another bad surprise.
