The signs are there, along the western Maine coast at least: growing numbers of small cod in lobster traps, increasing trawl and gillnet catches in inshore waters, a steady number coming through the Portland Fish Exchange. To the east things aren’t as good, but even in Stonington, once the base of a large gillnet fishery, fishermen report seeing more cod than they have in recent years.
Are the regulations imposed by the state and federal governments working? As Ben Neal reports in this issue of WWF, it depends on whom you ask.
The federal numbers “reveal that the decline in population has been slowed or stopped,” Neal writes. But around half of all breeding fish in the population are removed each year, and the population “is somewhere around one-quarter of where the government thinks it should be.”
Fishermen have long been suspicious of the government’s figures, many of which are derived from offshore trawl surveys that don’t take inshore fish populations into account. Reports of malfunctioning gear used in these surveys haven’t helped; neither has the federal government’s dismal track record in managing fish stocks. And the increase in cod in fishermen’s own nets and traps is there for all to see.
The signs, optimistic and otherwise, argue for a cautious course if recovery is ever to become a reality. Whatever the picture turns out to be, its outlines will take years to become clear. As Neal puts it, “it is a recovery that still could be derailed.”
On shore, meanwhile, Maine continues to lose access to its former fisheries as properties are converted from fisheries-related uses to other things, and as permits to fish offshore lapse. Will we, after expending so much to bring back the fisheries, be able to reach them at all? It’s something to ponder.