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| Program > Quantifying the Sea and Forecasting the Fish |
| Programme > Quantifier l'océan et prévoir les poissons |
| Jennifer
Hubbard (University of Toronto) Forecasting Fish |
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The collapse of the Northern Cod and Northwest Atlantic groundfish stocks in the late 1980s and 1990s marked the destruction of the world’s historically most productive fishery. This disaster, ironically, marked roughly the one hundredth anniversary of fisheries biology, a discipline organized around the premise that science could be used to monitor, improve, and increase the fisheries. It also occurred about twenty years after the international community agreed to extend the national territorial waters out to a 200 mile limit: a move partially predicated on the need to better manage ocean resources. This, naturally, has created skepticism about the value of this science, and particularly the Canadian practice of fisheries biology. The roots of the modern crisis indeed lie within the historical contingencies which shaped the science. Fisheries biology was a new field in the process of developing its own methodologies and sub-disciplines in the first decades of the twentieth century. Scientists who entered this new discipline arrived from a variety of backgrounds and with different presuppositions. This paper will discuss the very different research traditions that developed on Canada’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts, shaped by such contingencies as the different periods in which fisheries biology became established on the two coasts, the contrasting nature of the coastal environments and fisheries, and the individuals involved. These various factors, impinging on an imprecise science that seeks to quantify and predict a largely invisible resource, has inevitably led to the mixed successes (or failures) which have characterized Canadian fisheries science in the recent period.
11
Bledlow Manor Dr.
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