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The Cod Came Back: What a Fishery Collapse Teaches Us About Overfishing · How To Protect The Ocean

• 0:00
  So the story that I've been told goes a little bit like this.
• 0:03
  The first Europeans to reach Newfoundland could lower a basket
• 0:06
  weighted with stones into the sea and pull it back up full of cod.
• 0:10
  Now, five centuries later, there were so few cod left that the government of Canada
• 0:14
  shut down the entire fishery overnight.
• 0:17
  It became one of the largest layoffs in the country's history, and this
• 0:20
  is the story of how it happened and how slowly the cod came back.
• 0:25
  That's what we're gonna talk about on today's episode of the
• 0:27
  How to Protect the Ocean podcast.
• 0:29
  I am your host, Andrew Lewin, here to talk to you about everything
• 0:32
  that has to do with ocean news, ocean science, ocean conservation.
• 0:36
  I'm a marine biologist and science communicator.
• 0:38
  This is what I love to do, and I'm now going to be on YouTube.
• 0:43
  So check this out on YouTube if you wanna watch some cool graphics or
• 0:46
  anything like that that I put up.
• 0:47
  We've got four episodes coming up, solo episodes based off of sustainable
• 0:51
  seafood, which is, the foundation today.
• 0:54
  We're gonna talk about what the problem really is and, the
• 0:57
  words you need to understand it.
• 0:58
  We talked to Dr. David, Shiffman, who is the two-time author, he came on
• 1:03
  the podcast to talk about his book, Why Sustainable Seafood Matters, which
• 1:07
  goes off his last book, Why Sharks Matter, which is his handle on Twitter.
• 1:11
  It's a really great book.
• 1:12
  Dave is a good friend of mine.
• 1:13
  so if you want to pre-order it, you can do so by going to the link in the show notes.
• 1:19
  You can check that out for yourself.
• 1:21
  One thing that I find with sustainable seafood, it's
• 1:23
  always a difficult thing to do.
• 1:24
  it's a difficult thing to wrap your head around when you start to look
• 1:29
  at, "How am I going to do this?" Like, how am I gonna eat it sustainably?
• 1:34
  Like, how can I make sure that the choices I make work?
• 1:37
  And that's a very difficult thing to do because, sometimes, you wonder if
• 1:41
  it's even worth it because you see headlines like, "The oceans will empty
• 1:44
  by 2048," or, "90% of the fish stocks are gone." So you stand at the seafood,
• 1:49
  counter like, just kind of frozen.
• 1:51
  What am I gonna do?" Is there anything okay to eat or is it already too late?
• 1:55
  And sometimes when you ask the person behind the counter, it could be, a
• 1:58
  young person, teenager, part-time job who's just like, "I have no idea.
• 2:03
  I don't know where this food came from.
• 2:04
  I don't know how it was caught.
• 2:05
  But there are apps to help you, So this week we're gonna talk about
• 2:08
  all that stuff to get you unstuck.
• 2:10
  And today we're gonna start with what's really going on, especially
• 2:13
  one of the most covered an iconic fisheries that is probably out there,
• 2:18
  and that's the Canadian cod fishery.
• 2:20
  it's a really interesting story, ups and downs, and we're kind of back on the
• 2:25
  up a little bit, but it's not something that, we really get to know all the time.
• 2:31
  But, we're gonna talk about that.
• 2:32
  'Cause, like, the thing is, we don't talk about overfishing enough.
• 2:35
  When you ask people, "What are the biggest threats to ocean life?"
• 2:37
  A lot of people will say climate change or plastic pollution or oil spills.
• 2:41
  And to be honest, those are threats.
• 2:42
  Those are key threats to the ocean.
• 2:44
  But overfishing is one of those.
• 2:46
  and that's something that is really big because it's taking away biodiversity.
• 2:51
  And according to the last review, global review of biodiversity that was ever
• 2:55
  done, it's, like, the largest one, they called it fishing was the thing
• 2:58
  that was the scariest thing to oceans.
• 3:01
  In 2019, a global science body named IPB- IPBES concluded that for marine
• 3:07
  ecosystems, direct exploitation of organisms, mainly fishing, has
• 3:12
  had the largest relative impact.
• 3:15
  And that covers three things: taking too many fish, which is overfishing,
• 3:19
  catching the wrong animals by accident, which is bycatch, and
• 3:22
  damaging habitat with fishing gear.
• 3:25
  And this episode is the first one, the taking too many fish, and the next two
• 3:29
  episodes in the series, like this week, we're gonna cover the other two, which
• 3:33
  is bycatch and then gear that could be harming, important fish habitat.
• 3:37
  So, the important thing here is I want you, if you wanna eat seafood, I want
• 3:41
  you to keep eating seafood without that guilty conscience, knowing that we know
• 3:46
  that it's fixable, One of the things that you can do is you can pre-order
• 3:49
  that book by David Shiffman and make sure you understand what is good, what's not.
• 3:54
  but also look at these apps that we have, and we'll talk about
• 3:58
  that at the end of this episode of course, and throughout the week.
• 4:01
  But let's talk about the Canadian cod, 'cause for centuries the Grand
• 4:05
  Banks off Newfoundland held one of the richest fish populations on Earth.
• 4:09
  Indigenous peoples fished there long before Europeans arrived, and when
• 4:14
  European explorers reached those waters in the late 1400s, the story
• 4:18
  they brought home was that the cod were so thick you could lower a basket
• 4:22
  into the water and haul it up full of the wonderful, wonderful fish.
• 4:27
  That abundance helped draw European powers across the Atlantic.
• 4:31
  Cod fed the communities, built towns, and filled export ships for nearly 500 years.
• 4:37
  Then the technology changed.
• 4:39
  Bigger boats, bigger nets, factory trawlers that could fish 24/7.
• 4:44
  And the thing is, people believed that the ocean was so big that
• 4:47
  it would never empty of the fish.
• 4:50
  And there were some warning signs.
• 4:52
  Some scientists and inshore fishers raised the alarm, but the catches just
• 4:55
  kept coming, and people assumed that if we just took a little too much, the fish
• 4:59
  would just bounce back But they didn't.
• 5:02
  So many adult cod were removed that there weren't enough left to replace themselves.
• 5:06
  On July 2nd, 1992 was a dark, dark day in Canada.
• 5:10
  Canada closed the northern cod fishery, like, overnight.
• 5:13
  About 30,000 people in Newfoundland and Labrador lost their jobs, roughly
• 5:16
  12% of the province's workforce.
• 5:19
  It was the largest single layoff in Canadian history.
• 5:22
  Within 10 years, the province had lost about 10% of its
• 5:26
  population, 'cause you have to understand how Newfoundland worked.
• 5:30
  They love to fish.
• 5:31
  They love their island.
• 5:33
  There is this thing, if you have never met someone from Newfoundland,
• 5:36
  they have this pride of their province, of their island, The Rock.
• 5:41
  They don't wanna leave it.
• 5:42
  They wanna stay there.
• 5:43
  And I don't blame them.
• 5:43
  Like, let's be honest, it's a beautiful place.
• 5:45
  windy, it's cold at times, sure.
• 5:47
  It's not for the weak, that's for sure.
• 5:48
  You need to really understand weather when you're there.
• 5:51
  But they love going out and fish.
• 5:53
  They would do it generation after generation after
• 5:56
  generation after generation.
• 5:58
  And then when it stopped overnight, I remember just, like, watching on TV and
• 6:04
  people storming the politician's offices.
• 6:07
  He had to barricade himself in his office because they were gonna
• 6:10
  come, they were gonna hurt him.
• 6:11
  Because they had nothing else.
• 6:13
  The only other thing that was there was oil and gas.
• 6:16
  Oil and gas across Canada.
• 6:17
  I remember talking to somebody, like, 10 years later, I was at a
• 6:20
  training for safety for offshore.
• 6:22
  This person was from Newfoundland.
• 6:24
  He wanted to come back to Newfoundland because he was going to Fort
• 6:27
  McMurray for the tar sands and the oil and gas business there.
• 6:31
  Hated it.
• 6:32
  Absolutely hated it.
• 6:33
  Again, that's a rough time to go up to Fort Mac during those times.
• 6:36
  But he had to leave because he had nothing else.
• 6:40
  So he was happy when the oil and gas industry started to, like, kind
• 6:43
  of got a little bit bigger back in Newfoundland, because he can come
• 6:46
  back to Newfoundland and live there.
• 6:48
  But the fishing is where it was.
• 6:49
  That was it.
• 6:50
  It was the fishing that kept everybody there, it kept everybody happy
• 6:54
  And the moratorium that was put in place in 1992 was supposed to be
• 6:58
  temporary, and it lasted 32 years.
• 7:02
  And, like, this is bigger than just a fish story.
• 7:05
  It's a people story.
• 7:07
  When you start to look at things you're losing in the ocean, the coastal
• 7:11
  communities that depend on the oceans lose along with it, and that's a huge thing.
• 7:16
  When we talk about overfishing and we talk about fisheries collapse, we often
• 7:20
  talk about, "Hey, the fish are the hero. We want to protect the fish," which is
• 7:23
  true, but oftentimes it's the people like, a lot of them are doing the overfishing.
• 7:29
  Well, maybe not them particularly, but the fishers that are doing the overfishing,
• 7:33
  but it's also, like, the politicians aren't really working for them.
• 7:37
  They're not trying to help them in any way.
• 7:38
  Sometimes you have to make some really rough decisions and tough decisions.
• 7:42
  But that's what happened, and we are still stuck in this place now where we're
• 7:46
  starting to see something to come back.
• 7:48
  But when you look back at it, there were three lessons that we learned from that
• 7:54
  time where the moratorium had to be put in place and the loss of the codfish.
• 7:58
  You got to listen to the data.
• 7:59
  That's lesson one.
• 8:00
  Just listen to that data, even when it's inconvenient.
• 8:04
  The government scientists knew that this was going down.
• 8:06
  They were telling the politicians.
• 8:07
  The politicians were buckling to the lobbyists who said, "Hey, we
• 8:10
  want to continue fishing," and the politicians wanted the votes.
• 8:12
  They're like, "Yeah, let's continue fishing." But there were also some
• 8:14
  scientists in DFO, in Fisheries and Oceans in Canada, were like,
• 8:17
  "Hey, hey, hey, this is going down.
• 8:19
  It's been going down for a long time." You have to listen to the data.
• 8:23
  The data shows everything, and the analysis shows everything.
• 8:26
  DFO had and still has some of the greatest fisheries biologists in the world.
• 8:32
  And you gotta listen to them though, that's the thing.
• 8:34
  That's lesson one.
• 8:35
  Lesson two, harming the ocean hurts the people who depend on it.
• 8:39
  Conservation and fisheries jobs are on the exact same side, oftentimes pitted
• 8:44
  against each other, but it really is trying to allow or making sure that
• 8:49
  people are, can fish for generations and generations without harming it.
• 8:54
  Sustainable fishing.
• 8:55
  And lesson three, recovery can take a very, very long time, and it's far
• 9:00
  cheaper to get it right the first time than have to restore or have to
• 9:03
  wait until a population jumps back.
• 9:07
  ' Cause, like, this is it, man.
• 9:08
  Like, the deal is, is that the cod just never really jumped
• 9:12
  back like we thought it would.
• 9:13
  And there are a lot of other things that are at play here.
• 9:16
  We took away a lot of the adults, so it was really
• 9:18
  difficult for them to come back.
• 9:20
  But also they could've moved, they could've shifted.
• 9:22
  Climate change, like, grew in terms of its consequences over those 30 years.
• 9:28
  So how do we know where these animals have gone?
• 9:30
  And how do we know that this is the population?
• 9:32
  Maybe they changed.
• 9:33
  Maybe they'll never be as big as they were.
• 9:35
  Who knows?
• 9:35
  We still don't know.
• 9:37
  There's some confusion around everything that happens here, Here's where
• 9:41
  most of the confusion comes from.
• 9:43
  There are two words that sound alike and mean very different
• 9:46
  things, and I want to go over that.
• 9:48
  The first word is overfishing.
• 9:50
  I want to define it 'cause overfishing is an action.
• 9:53
  We're catching fish faster than the population can replace
• 9:56
  themselves, like right now.
• 9:57
  Overfishing is a state that's happening right now.
• 9:59
  Overfished is a state that's already happened.
• 10:02
  The population is already too small.
• 10:04
  And then you have four combinations.
• 10:05
  And they'll tell you everything.
• 10:07
  Overfishing but not yet overfished.
• 10:10
  We're taking too many.
• 10:11
  The population is still healthy.
• 10:14
  Ease off now, and it'll recover fast.
• 10:17
  Overfished but no overfishing, so the damage is done.
• 10:21
  The pressure has been lifted because we're not gonna fish anymore, or we're
• 10:24
  not gonna fish as much as anymore, and it's probably gonna recover.
• 10:28
  Overfished and overfishing, the worst case.
• 10:32
  That's a problem that's making it worse, Not only are they small, but you're
• 10:36
  overfishing, so you can't replace itself, so they're gonna get even smaller.
• 10:39
  And if you have neither, that's the goal, you wanna make sure that you're
• 10:42
  not overfishing, or it's not overfished.
• 10:45
  And the word depleted gets used differently in different
• 10:47
  places, but it generally means overfished or on the way there,
• 10:52
  so that's like, a third term that people don't really understand, so
• 10:56
  depleted gets used differently in different places, but it generally
• 11:00
  means overfished or on the way there.
• 11:03
  Fully fished, which the Fisheries and Agriculture Organization, FAO, now calls
• 11:07
  its maximally sustainably fished, this is the term that causes most of the trouble.
• 11:12
  It sounds pretty bad, but it's actually the target.
• 11:15
  The fishery's producing as much food and as many jobs as it can
• 11:19
  without shrinking the population.
• 11:21
  So fully fished means we are doing the right thing here, which makes it sound
• 11:25
  really confusing 'cause fully fished just doesn't sound right in my opinion.
• 11:29
  I have a little story for you.
• 11:30
  It's a recent story.
• 11:31
  In June 2025, what I mentioned before, FAO, released its detailed global
• 11:36
  assessment on fish stocks ever.
• 11:38
  It's the most detailed.
• 11:39
  Everything was huge on there.
• 11:41
  More than 650 experts from over 90 countries looked at
• 11:45
  2,570 individual fish stocks.
• 11:49
  They found that 35.5% of the stocks were overfished, that means they're
• 11:53
  small, the population is small.
• 11:55
  That's more than a third of all fisheries.
• 11:58
  that's a problem.
• 11:59
  That's a real problem.
• 12:00
  They also found that 64.5% are fished within sustainable levels, and because
• 12:06
  the best-managed stocks tend to be the big ones, 77.2% of all the fish actually
• 12:12
  landed came from sustainable stocks.
• 12:14
  I bet you you didn't know that.
• 12:16
  Now, here's the trick you'll see online.
• 12:19
  Someone takes the overfished stocks and adds them to the stocks fished at
• 12:22
  the sustainable maximum, and announces that more than 90% of the world's fish
• 12:26
  stocks are overfished or fully fished.
• 12:29
  Technically, the arithmetic works.
• 12:32
  The meaning is badly misleading because one of those categories is the
• 12:36
  problem and the other one is the goal.
• 12:38
  Fully fished is the goal, overfished is the problem.
• 12:42
  When you think of a third of the stocks that are overfished, that's bad.
• 12:44
  we know that, I don't need to exaggerate that number.
• 12:48
  A third of the stocks are overfished.
• 12:50
  The population is small.
• 12:52
  And when people tend to exaggerate it, it makes it like, a problem harder to
• 12:55
  solve because it makes the problem sound hopeless, and that's, we don't need that.
• 12:59
  When you have the opposite, two-thirds of the stocks are fully
• 13:02
  fished, meaning they're sustainably managed, that's not bad, Like, you
• 13:05
  gotta be careful that a statistic can make you feel like giving up.
• 13:09
  And I think a lot of times when we have this overfishing problem, that can
• 13:13
  definitely be a problem, But when we look at, like, how the categories were
• 13:17
  combined, makes a little bit better sense.
• 13:20
  And I wanna talk about a friend of mine, Angelo Villagomez, who's a
• 13:23
  friend of the show, and he has a line that I love: "If you kill fewer
• 13:26
  fish, more fish will be alive." And that's fishery science explained to a
• 13:31
  10-year-old, and it's exactly right.
• 13:33
  In practice, a well-managed fishery has four things: a limit on the total
• 13:37
  catch set by scientists, rules to reduce bycatch, especially of endangered species,
• 13:43
  and rules to limit damage to habitat.
• 13:46
  Data behind all of it, how many fish are there, how long do they live, how fast do
• 13:51
  they grow, and how often do they breed?
• 13:54
  And one more ingredient people tend to forget, the fishers at the table,
• 13:58
  People follow rules they help shape.
• 14:00
  And in the US, regional councils that include fishers
• 14:03
  help set those catch limits.
• 14:05
  When fishers see that data and the reasoning, they're far more likely
• 14:08
  to accept a cut today so that they can keep fishing tomorrow.
• 14:12
  Things change over time.
• 14:14
  I mean, fishers know that.
• 14:14
  Fishing communities know that.
• 14:16
  Whether they're indigenous or non-indigenous, things change.
• 14:19
  Things can get worse in the ocean, things can get better in the ocean, depending
• 14:22
  on where you are, And so having rights holders and stakeholders at the table
• 14:27
  talking to each other, battling it out at some times, in a respectful way, that
• 14:32
  makes things better in the long run.
• 14:34
  It's harder to do and it takes longer, but it helps in the long run.
• 14:38
  And not every country has the money for full stock assessment,
• 14:41
  so the data's not always there.
• 14:43
  Scientists have developed data-limited methods for those places, so lack
• 14:47
  of funding doesn't have to mean lack of management, which is great.
• 14:50
  Now, in the United States, 51 fish stocks have been rebuilt since 2000.
• 14:55
  Pacific bluefin tuna was rebuilt a full decade ahead of schedule in 2024,
• 14:59
  which let the US fishers increase their catch limit by 80% the next year.
• 15:04
  Globally, the regions with strong management, like the Northeast
• 15:07
  Pacific, have more than 90% of the stocks fully fished sustainably.
• 15:11
  Now I wanna go back to the beginning of this episode where
• 15:14
  I talked about the codfish.
• 15:15
  In 2024, after 32 years, Canada lifted the northern cod moratorium and
• 15:20
  reopened a commercial fishery with a cautious catch limit of 18,000 tons.
• 15:26
  Now, I must say, this was highly contested by scientists, and the reason why it was,
• 15:32
  was because their population was stagnant.
• 15:35
  So the population wasn't predicted to grow.
• 15:38
  It was predicted to stay the same or go lower, and the government opened it up to,
• 15:43
  commercial fishing, industrial fishing, just a little further offshore before
• 15:48
  it was opened up to artisanal fishers.
• 15:50
  Now, there were a lot of scientists, NGOs, and so forth, who were not too
• 15:54
  happy with this type of result, and this was purely done by the minister,
• 15:59
  the DFO minister, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans ministers.
• 16:02
  So scientists are gonna watch.
• 16:03
  They're gonna keep watching.
• 16:04
  And in 2005, the limit rose to 38,000 tons, which was contested.
• 16:09
  And for 2026, it rose again to 59,000 tons, again contested, after the latest
• 16:14
  assessment placed the stock in the healthy zone for the first time since 1992.
• 16:19
  A whole generation of Newfoundlanders grew up never seeing a real cod fishery,
• 16:23
  and their kids may actually see this.
• 16:25
  So it is coming back, but we still have to be very cautious.
• 16:28
  We still have to remember that if we get a little too, like,
• 16:31
  trigger-happy those codfish can go back to where they were before.
• 16:36
  And so as this quota's rising and people are worried, you gotta remember
• 16:40
  we are still way below the stock size.
• 16:43
  And the recovery is still happening.
• 16:45
  If we kind of push the limits too much, that recovery's gonna take
• 16:49
  longer, But the lesson that we're learning today is still the same one
• 16:52
  from the collapsed and turned around.
• 16:54
  Listen to the data and the ocean gives back.
• 16:57
  I guess the cautious thing is, is try not to open it too quickly,
• 17:01
  Now, I want you to do me a favor.
• 17:02
  I want you to pick one fish you eat the most.
• 17:05
  Look up that stock status this week.
• 17:07
  Where do you look?
• 17:08
  You can look at a seafood guide, so Seafood Watch or Marine Stewardship
• 17:12
  Council or Ocean Wise app.
• 17:14
  Any of those you can look through, and they have data on all of it,
• 17:18
  or you can look at your National Fisheries Agency stock, status, page.
• 17:21
  If you're in Canada, you can look at Oceanic Canada to get a little bit
• 17:24
  of a, NGO feel to what's happening with a lot of the fisheries.
• 17:28
  They do have a fishery assessment, stock assessment every year looking at what
• 17:31
  fisheries have data, what don't, what could be considered well-managed, all
• 17:35
  that kind of stuff, and it's really great.
• 17:37
  I highly recommend that you go take a look at that, I want you to ask a few questions
• 17:41
  that you learned from this episode today.
• 17:43
  Is it overfished?
• 17:45
  is overfishing still happening?
• 17:46
  And is it fished at a sustainable level?
• 17:49
  And I think once you know those three words, the depleted,
• 17:52
  overfishing, overfished, you can read any fish headline the way a
• 17:56
  scientist does, which is important.
• 17:58
  A lot of times these terms can be difficult, and then once you understand
• 18:01
  it, then you get what's happening and what people are telling each other.
• 18:05
  Today was about how many fish we take.
• 18:07
  Tomorrow, the next episode, is gonna be about what else ends up in the net.
• 18:11
  Whales, turtles, dolphins, and the clever fixes to set them free.
• 18:16
  Now, just think about this, close on a small wharf in Newfoundland
• 18:19
  in summer, a boat comes in, A crew unloads cod, a fish their grandparents
• 18:24
  caught and their parents never could.
• 18:27
  So think about that.
• 18:28
  There is a recovery here that's really great, and the ocean can recover when
• 18:32
  we let the scientists set the limits, and the, the managers to understand what
• 18:37
  those limits mean, and the cod are proof.
• 18:39
  We're not out of the woods yet.
• 18:41
  This is not as, a full-on success story.
• 18:43
  We still have to be cautious, and I feel like we're kind of pushing it a little too
• 18:46
  much with increasing the cod limits, and I think we're getting pressured by other
• 18:51
  outside factors that are affecting this.
• 18:54
  But we are seeing a recovery, and that's important because management happens.
• 19:00
  Understanding how the ocean works, understanding how climate
• 19:03
  change is affecting and other things are affecting it along with
• 19:05
  it, that helps in the recovery.
• 19:08
  It all helps.
• 19:09
  Data's important.
• 19:10
  Listening to the data is important.
• 19:11
  Listening to the scientists is important, and that's our episode for today,
• 19:14
  'cause you've been listening to this scientist talk about cod fishery and
• 19:17
  sustainable seafood, all about, that's what we're talking all about this week.
• 19:21
  So don't forget to follow, subscribe, whatever you need to
• 19:25
  do on your favorite podcast app.
• 19:27
  If you're on Spotify, there's a comment, section.
• 19:29
  You can hit me up with a comment.
• 19:30
  I'd love to hear from you.
• 19:31
  I usually get a notification when that comment hits.
• 19:33
  I'll try and answer back as soon as possible.
• 19:35
  And of course, if you're watching this on YouTube, you can comment down below.
• 19:38
  All the links are in the show notes as well.
• 19:40
  So I want to thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the
• 19:43
  How to Protect the Ocean podcast.
• 19:44
  I'm your host, Andrew Lewin.
• 19:45
  Have a great day.
• 19:46
  We'll talk to you next time, and happy conservation.