- This is a trout stand-in for a Cod.
Henry David Thoreau called it the “bare and bended arm” of New England. Cape Cod was named for the schools of codfish that filled Massachusetts Bay to brimming and satisfied Colonial appetites.
“Cod has a complicated and very long history,” says Professor Francis Juanes, in the UMass Amherst Fisheries Biology Department. “Although there are other species of ‘cod’ (tomcod in the Hudson River, Pacifi c cod), the ones on Cape Cod menus are almost surely Atlantic cod—Gadus morhua.”
Juanes explains that in U.S. waters, there are two recognized stocks of Gadus morhua: the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank. A stock is a fisheries management term used to separate groups of fish managed in similar ways; sometimes stocks come from one population of a species, sometimes from more than one. “Both stocks are well below historical records and continue to be overfi shed,” says Juanes.
The danger of overfishing is illustrated by Canada’s infamous northern cod collapse in the early 1990s. Canadian stocks have seen a 99 percent decline from historical records, and the fi shery has mostly been closed for the last 15 years.
The best source of information on the status of cod stocks comes from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), the agency that manages cod outside the threemile state limit. According to reports published on their website, Gulf of Maine spawning stock has increased somewhat consistently since the late 1990s, while Georges Bank cod has been slower to rebound. From a record low in 1995, it climbed through the late 1990s but has been in decline since 2001.
To help populations rebound, the NMFS has instituted trip limits for fi shermen of both Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank cod that are set according to biomassrebuilding targets and time-frames. In addition, Massachusetts Marine Fisheries declared a cod conservation zone off the coast of Boston, which seeks to help Gulf of Maine stock rebuild by instituting additional fi shing closures in the area.
Juanes says the best popular account of the fascinating history of the cod fi shery is Mark Kurlansky’s 1997 international bestseller, Cod: The Biography of the Fish that Changed the World.
Cape Cod is still a seafood lover’s paradise even as it deals with the challenges of rebuilding overf shed stocks. Regulation has helped marine populations rebound, and locally harvested seafood and cod—as well as haddock, swordfi sh, halibut, clams, lobster, and scallops—are still the stars of the Cape’s banquet, most caught and served the same day.
