| Natures spring: Cod bounce back | |
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It's the summer of 1497, and explorer John Cabot, freshly arrived from Europe, eagerly samples the waters off what are now eastern Canada.
"The sea there is swarming with fish, which can be taken not only with the net, but in baskets let down with a stone, so that it sinks in the water," wrote the Milanese ambassador to London to his Ducal boss, in an account of the voyage.
Fast forward to 1993, and the cod fishery on the Scotian Shelf off Nova Scotia has to be closed, because the fish are so scarce that you'd be hard pressed to catch any with an ocean-sized vacuum cleaner, let alone a net - a situation found elsewhere in the region, most notably the fecund Grand Banks. |
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The collapse of cod stocks here to less than 1% of their former abundance remains the exemplar of human over-consumption of resources and of nature's response to it.
But this week there's a bit of good news - well, sort of - in the shape of a study in Nature journal suggesting the cod, as well as some of the other big predatory fish we love to eat, could be on their way back.
The statistics revealed in the paper by Kenneth Frank and colleagues, from the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, are fascinating. |
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