Fishing stakeholders are less than pleased with the recent study that says increasing water temperatures — along with overfishing — played a significant role in the collapse of the cod stock in the Gulf of Maine.
The study, performed by the Gulf of Maine Research Institute and appearing in the journal Science, concluded the Gulf of Maine’s surface water is warming more rapidly than 99.9 percent of the rest of the world’s oceans and that climate change is a contributing factor to the demise of the cod stock.
The problem, according to stakeholders, is that the GMRI study arrived at its conclusions using the findings of the very same stock assessment science they consider flawed and inaccurate about the status of New England’s most iconic fish stock.
“My first question was whether any part of the study started out to understand the true status of Gulf of Maine cod or if they just assumed that the data from the assessment, which we contend is consistently wrong, is fact,” Vito Giacalone, policy director for the Gloucester-based Northeast Seafood Coalition, said. “I was told it was the latter.”
Giacalone asked his questions of the survey’s writers during a Thursday conference call for stakeholders and others after the study’s findings had been released.
The problem, Giacalone told the writers and federal regulators, is that New England fishermen, from recreational anglers to commercial fin fishermen and lobstermen, have uniformly said they have seen more cod this season than in recent memory. That’s despite the declarations of environmental groups and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that the imperiled stock is nearly wiped out.
“But by then they’d muted me,” he said.
Giacalone on Friday challenged the study’s authors and those involved in the stock assessment process to break away from their dependence on computer models and questionable science and begin to listen to stakeholders and pursue what they hear.
“Instead of clinging to this science that we all know is flawed, why don’t they go out and investigate what the fishermen are seeing rather than going off and looking for correlations that are attractive for funding — climate change,” Giacalone said. “That’s become the golden goose, and that’s all GMRI does now. I don’t see how they can help any more with the industry.”
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