The Cod Came Back: What a Fishery Collapse Teaches Us About Overfishing

0:00 So the story that I've been told goes a little bit like this. The first Europeans to reach Newfoundland could lower a basket weighted with stones into the sea and pull it back up full of cod. Now, five centuries later, there were so few cod left that the government of Canada shut down the entire fishery overnight. It became one of the largest layoffs in the country's history, and this is the story of how it happened and how slowly the cod came back. That's what we're gonna talk about on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I am your host, Andrew Lewin, here to talk to you about everything that has to do with ocean news, ocean science, ocean conservation. I'm a marine biologist and science communicator. 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 anything like that that I put up. We've got four episodes coming up, solo episodes based off of sustainable seafood, which is, the foundation today. We're gonna talk about what the problem really is and, the words you need to understand it. We talked to Dr. David, Shiffman, who is the two-time author, he came on the podcast to talk about his book, Why Sustainable Seafood Matters, which goes off his last book, Why Sharks Matter, which is his handle on Twitter. It's a really great book. Dave is a good friend of mine. so if you want to pre-order it, you can do so by going to the link in the show notes. You can check that out for yourself. One thing that I find with sustainable seafood, it's always a difficult thing to do.

1:24 it's a difficult thing to wrap your head around when you start to look at, "How am I going to do this?" Like, how am I gonna eat it sustainably? Like, how can I make sure that the choices I make work? And that's a very difficult thing to do because, sometimes, you wonder if it's even worth it because you see headlines like, "The oceans will empty by 2048," or, "90% of the fish stocks are gone." So you stand at the seafood, counter like, just kind of frozen. What am I gonna do?" Is there anything okay to eat or is it already too late? And sometimes when you ask the person behind the counter, it could be, a young person, teenager, part-time job who's just like, "I have no idea. I don't know where this food came from. 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 all that stuff to get you unstuck. And today we're gonna start with what's really going on, especially one of the most covered an iconic fisheries that is probably out there, and that's the Canadian cod fishery. it's a really interesting story, ups and downs, and we're kind of back on the up a little bit, but it's not something that, we really get to know all the time. But, we're gonna talk about that. 'Cause, like, the thing is, we don't talk about overfishing enough. When you ask people, "What are the biggest threats to ocean life?" A lot of people will say climate change or plastic pollution or oil spills. And to be honest, those are threats. Those are key threats to the ocean. But overfishing is one of those.

2:46 and that's something that is really big because it's taking away biodiversity. And according to the last review, global review of biodiversity that was ever done, it's, like, the largest one, they called it fishing was the thing that was the scariest thing to oceans. In 2019, a global science body named IPB- IPBES concluded that for marine ecosystems, direct exploitation of organisms, mainly fishing, has had the largest relative impact. And that covers three things: taking too many fish, which is overfishing, catching the wrong animals by accident, which is bycatch, and damaging habitat with fishing gear. And this episode is the first one, the taking too many fish, and the next two episodes in the series, like this week, we're gonna cover the other two, which 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 you to keep eating seafood without that guilty conscience, knowing that we know that it's fixable, One of the things that you can do is you can pre-order that book by David Shiffman and make sure you understand what is good, what's not. but also look at these apps that we have, and we'll talk about that at the end of this episode of course, and throughout the week. But let's talk about the Canadian cod, 'cause for centuries the Grand Banks off Newfoundland held one of the richest fish populations on Earth. Indigenous peoples fished there long before Europeans arrived, and when European explorers reached those waters in the late 1400s, the story they brought home was that the cod were so thick you could lower a basket into the water and haul it up full of the wonderful, wonderful fish.

4:27 That abundance helped draw European powers across the Atlantic. Cod fed the communities, built towns, and filled export ships for nearly 500 years. Then the technology changed. Bigger boats, bigger nets, factory trawlers that could fish 24/7. And the thing is, people believed that the ocean was so big that it would never empty of the fish. And there were some warning signs. Some scientists and inshore fishers raised the alarm, but the catches just kept coming, and people assumed that if we just took a little too much, the fish would just bounce back But they didn't. So many adult cod were removed that there weren't enough left to replace themselves. On July 2nd, 1992 was a dark, dark day in Canada.

5:10 Canada closed the northern cod fishery, like, overnight. About 30,000 people in Newfoundland and Labrador lost their jobs, roughly 12% of the province's workforce. It was the largest single layoff in Canadian history. Within 10 years, the province had lost about 10% of its population, 'cause you have to understand how Newfoundland worked. They love to fish. They love their island. There is this thing, if you have never met someone from Newfoundland, they have this pride of their province, of their island, The Rock. They don't wanna leave it. They wanna stay there. And I don't blame them. Like, let's be honest, it's a beautiful place. windy, it's cold at times, sure. It's not for the weak, that's for sure. You need to really understand weather when you're there.

5:51 But they love going out and fish. They would do it generation after generation after generation after generation. And then when it stopped overnight, I remember just, like, watching on TV and people storming the politician's offices. He had to barricade himself in his office because they were gonna come, they were gonna hurt him. Because they had nothing else. The only other thing that was there was oil and gas. Oil and gas across Canada. I remember talking to somebody, like, 10 years later, I was at a training for safety for offshore. This person was from Newfoundland. He wanted to come back to Newfoundland because he was going to Fort McMurray for the tar sands and the oil and gas business there. Hated it.

6:32 Absolutely hated it. Again, that's a rough time to go up to Fort Mac during those times. But he had to leave because he had nothing else. So he was happy when the oil and gas industry started to, like, kind of got a little bit bigger back in Newfoundland, because he can come back to Newfoundland and live there. But the fishing is where it was. That was it. It was the fishing that kept everybody there, it kept everybody happy And the moratorium that was put in place in 1992 was supposed to be temporary, and it lasted 32 years. And, like, this is bigger than just a fish story. It's a people story. When you start to look at things you're losing in the ocean, the coastal 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 talk about, "Hey, the fish are the hero. We want to protect the fish," which is true, but oftentimes it's the people like, a lot of them are doing the overfishing. Well, maybe not them particularly, but the fishers that are doing the overfishing, but it's also, like, the politicians aren't really working for them. They're not trying to help them in any way. Sometimes you have to make some really rough decisions and tough decisions. But that's what happened, and we are still stuck in this place now where we're starting to see something to come back. But when you look back at it, there were three lessons that we learned from that 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. That's lesson one. Just listen to that data, even when it's inconvenient. The government scientists knew that this was going down. They were telling the politicians. The politicians were buckling to the lobbyists who said, "Hey, we want to continue fishing," and the politicians wanted the votes. They're like, "Yeah, let's continue fishing." But there were also some scientists in DFO, in Fisheries and Oceans in Canada, were like, "Hey, hey, hey, this is going down. It's been going down for a long time." You have to listen to the data. The data shows everything, and the analysis shows everything. DFO had and still has some of the greatest fisheries biologists in the world. And you gotta listen to them though, that's the thing. That's lesson one. 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 against each other, but it really is trying to allow or making sure that people are, can fish for generations and generations without harming it. Sustainable fishing. And lesson three, recovery can take a very, very long time, and it's far cheaper to get it right the first time than have to restore or have to wait until a population jumps back. ' Cause, like, this is it, man. Like, the deal is, is that the cod just never really jumped back like we thought it would. And there are a lot of other things that are at play here. We took away a lot of the adults, so it was really difficult for them to come back.

9:20 But also they could've moved, they could've shifted. Climate change, like, grew in terms of its consequences over those 30 years. So how do we know where these animals have gone? And how do we know that this is the population? Maybe they changed. Maybe they'll never be as big as they were. Who knows? We still don't know. There's some confusion around everything that happens here, Here's where most of the confusion comes from. There are two words that sound alike and mean very different things, and I want to go over that. The first word is overfishing. I want to define it 'cause overfishing is an action. We're catching fish faster than the population can replace themselves, like right now. Overfishing is a state that's happening right now. Overfished is a state that's already happened.

10:02 The population is already too small. And then you have four combinations. And they'll tell you everything. Overfishing but not yet overfished. We're taking too many. The population is still healthy. Ease off now, and it'll recover fast. Overfished but no overfishing, so the damage is done. The pressure has been lifted because we're not gonna fish anymore, or we're not gonna fish as much as anymore, and it's probably gonna recover. Overfished and overfishing, the worst case. That's a problem that's making it worse, Not only are they small, but you're overfishing, so you can't replace itself, so they're gonna get even smaller. And if you have neither, that's the goal, you wanna make sure that you're not overfishing, or it's not overfished.

10:45 And the word depleted gets used differently in different places, but it generally means overfished or on the way there, so that's like, a third term that people don't really understand, so depleted gets used differently in different places, but it generally means overfished or on the way there. Fully fished, which the Fisheries and Agriculture Organization, FAO, now calls its maximally sustainably fished, this is the term that causes most of the trouble. It sounds pretty bad, but it's actually the target. The fishery's producing as much food and as many jobs as it can without shrinking the population. So fully fished means we are doing the right thing here, which makes it sound really confusing 'cause fully fished just doesn't sound right in my opinion.

11:29 I have a little story for you. It's a recent story. In June 2025, what I mentioned before, FAO, released its detailed global assessment on fish stocks ever. It's the most detailed. Everything was huge on there. More than 650 experts from over 90 countries looked at 2,570 individual fish stocks. They found that 35.5% of the stocks were overfished, that means they're small, the population is small. That's more than a third of all fisheries. that's a problem. That's a real problem. They also found that 64.5% are fished within sustainable levels, and because the best-managed stocks tend to be the big ones, 77.2% of all the fish actually landed came from sustainable stocks.

12:14 I bet you you didn't know that. Now, here's the trick you'll see online. Someone takes the overfished stocks and adds them to the stocks fished at the sustainable maximum, and announces that more than 90% of the world's fish stocks are overfished or fully fished. Technically, the arithmetic works. The meaning is badly misleading because one of those categories is the problem and the other one is the goal. Fully fished is the goal, overfished is the problem. When you think of a third of the stocks that are overfished, that's bad. we know that, I don't need to exaggerate that number. A third of the stocks are overfished. The population is small. And when people tend to exaggerate it, it makes it like, a problem harder to 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 fished, meaning they're sustainably managed, that's not bad, Like, you gotta be careful that a statistic can make you feel like giving up. And I think a lot of times when we have this overfishing problem, that can definitely be a problem, But when we look at, like, how the categories were combined, makes a little bit better sense. And I wanna talk about a friend of mine, Angelo Villagomez, who's a friend of the show, and he has a line that I love: "If you kill fewer fish, more fish will be alive." And that's fishery science explained to a 10-year-old, and it's exactly right. In practice, a well-managed fishery has four things: a limit on the total catch set by scientists, rules to reduce bycatch, especially of endangered species, 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 they grow, and how often do they breed? And one more ingredient people tend to forget, the fishers at the table, People follow rules they help shape. And in the US, regional councils that include fishers help set those catch limits. When fishers see that data and the reasoning, they're far more likely to accept a cut today so that they can keep fishing tomorrow. Things change over time. I mean, fishers know that. Fishing communities know that. Whether they're indigenous or non-indigenous, things change. Things can get worse in the ocean, things can get better in the ocean, depending on where you are, And so having rights holders and stakeholders at the table talking to each other, battling it out at some times, in a respectful way, that 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. And not every country has the money for full stock assessment, so the data's not always there. Scientists have developed data-limited methods for those places, so lack of funding doesn't have to mean lack of management, which is great. Now, in the United States, 51 fish stocks have been rebuilt since 2000. Pacific bluefin tuna was rebuilt a full decade ahead of schedule in 2024, which let the US fishers increase their catch limit by 80% the next year. Globally, the regions with strong management, like the Northeast Pacific, have more than 90% of the stocks fully fished sustainably. Now I wanna go back to the beginning of this episode where I talked about the codfish.

15:15 In 2024, after 32 years, Canada lifted the northern cod moratorium and reopened a commercial fishery with a cautious catch limit of 18,000 tons. Now, I must say, this was highly contested by scientists, and the reason why it was, was because their population was stagnant. So the population wasn't predicted to grow. It was predicted to stay the same or go lower, and the government opened it up to, commercial fishing, industrial fishing, just a little further offshore before it was opened up to artisanal fishers. Now, there were a lot of scientists, NGOs, and so forth, who were not too happy with this type of result, and this was purely done by the minister, the DFO minister, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans ministers.

16:02 So scientists are gonna watch. They're gonna keep watching. And in 2005, the limit rose to 38,000 tons, which was contested. And for 2026, it rose again to 59,000 tons, again contested, after the latest assessment placed the stock in the healthy zone for the first time since 1992. A whole generation of Newfoundlanders grew up never seeing a real cod fishery, and their kids may actually see this. So it is coming back, but we still have to be very cautious. We still have to remember that if we get a little too, like, trigger-happy those codfish can go back to where they were before. And so as this quota's rising and people are worried, you gotta remember we are still way below the stock size.

16:43 And the recovery is still happening. If we kind of push the limits too much, that recovery's gonna take longer, But the lesson that we're learning today is still the same one from the collapsed and turned around. Listen to the data and the ocean gives back. I guess the cautious thing is, is try not to open it too quickly, Now, I want you to do me a favor. I want you to pick one fish you eat the most. Look up that stock status this week. Where do you look? You can look at a seafood guide, so Seafood Watch or Marine Stewardship Council or Ocean Wise app. Any of those you can look through, and they have data on all of it, or you can look at your National Fisheries Agency stock, status, page. If you're in Canada, you can look at Oceanic Canada to get a little bit 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 fisheries have data, what don't, what could be considered well-managed, all that kind of stuff, and it's really great. I highly recommend that you go take a look at that, I want you to ask a few questions that you learned from this episode today. Is it overfished? is overfishing still happening? And is it fished at a sustainable level? And I think once you know those three words, the depleted, overfishing, overfished, you can read any fish headline the way a scientist does, which is important. A lot of times these terms can be difficult, and then once you understand it, then you get what's happening and what people are telling each other. Today was about how many fish we take. 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. Now, just think about this, close on a small wharf in Newfoundland in summer, a boat comes in, A crew unloads cod, a fish their grandparents caught and their parents never could. So think about that. There is a recovery here that's really great, and the ocean can recover when we let the scientists set the limits, and the, the managers to understand what those limits mean, and the cod are proof. We're not out of the woods yet. This is not as, a full-on success story. We still have to be cautious, and I feel like we're kind of pushing it a little too much with increasing the cod limits, and I think we're getting pressured by other outside factors that are affecting this.

18:54 But we are seeing a recovery, and that's important because management happens. Understanding how the ocean works, understanding how climate change is affecting and other things are affecting it along with it, that helps in the recovery. It all helps. Data's important. Listening to the data is important. Listening to the scientists is important, and that's our episode for today, 'cause you've been listening to this scientist talk about cod fishery and sustainable seafood, all about, that's what we're talking all about this week. So don't forget to follow, subscribe, whatever you need to do on your favorite podcast app. If you're on Spotify, there's a comment, section. You can hit me up with a comment. I'd love to hear from you. I usually get a notification when that comment hits. 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. All the links are in the show notes as well. So I want to thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time, and happy conservation.