Fisheries Management Fa 08

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Fisheries Management: Depletion of the Grand Banks

Background Information

The Grand Banks are located on the North American Continental Shelf just off the coast of Newfoundland. They are comprised of hundreds of underwater plateaus, which range in depths of around 80 feet to anywhere up to 300 feet making it a relatively shallow area. This area has become a gold mine in the fishing industry due to the cold Labrador Current mixing in with the Gulf Stream, which creates a lot of nutrients.

Since the bottom is vastly different in certain areas the nutrients created by the mixing of these waters are brought to the surface. When this happens in creates one of the richest fishing grounds in the world. Species include Atlantic cod, haddock and capelin as well as lobster and scallops. The area also supports large colonies of sea birds and various sea mammals such as seals, dolphins and whales.

History of the Grand Banks

The first European explorers described the waters as being so full of cod you just had to lower a basket into the water to bring it up full of cod. From this point on thousands of people turned to Newfoundland in hopes of gaining the benefits of these rich waters.c Small inshore boats took sustainable amounts of cod for centuries up to the 1950s. All of this changed for the worse as more and more people came in the 1950s. Due to technological advances in trawler design and power on the factory whaling ships, the last remaining whale populations were devastated as a result. With huge nets these trawlers could haul up seemingly endless quantities of fish. They were able to quickly process and deep-freeze the catch allowing them to work even faster than desired. It got to a point that in an hour, they can haul up as much as 200 tons of fish, Nearly double the amount as a typical 16th century ship would have caught in an entire season.

The cod catch steadily increased to 800,000 tons in 1968 but this was the peak of the clearly unsustainable catches. By 1975 the annual catch had fallen by more than 60 percent and has continued to drop ever since. Catches of other fish have fallen as a result of this over fishing. This decline eventually forced Canada to extend its fishing limit for foreign vessels from 12 miles to 200 miles from its coast.