A coddy story

A correspondent sent me a statistical table about the landings of Atlantic cod in Maine since 1950. After some jiggling about, I persuaded Excel to produce the statistical chart above: getting the data into Excel from a pdf easy, getting Excel to produce a labelled chart by year more tricky - and I seem to be stuck with having a complete date, rather than a partial date, that is to say just the year. But what is going on? They pushed catches up until the early 1990's, when there was some sort of catastrophic failure, followed by more or less steady decline down to more or less nothing.

At the website of the Maine Department of Marine Resources, from which the cod came, I find the Commissioner's biennial report for 1968, from which another statistical table is snapped above. We might think that cod is a big deal over here, but in Maine it does not look to be very important at all, at least not in 1968. To the point where the word 'cod' occurred just twice in the report. Something called ocean perch (of reference 3) was much more important - although maybe they have driven that to extinction since then too. As were herring and whiting. And much more important again were lobster and clam. So the shellfish gang are, presumably, the people who really have the ear of the Commissioner. And maybe there is some watery equivalent of the National Rifle Association which keeps him in line, makes sure that he does not interfere with the constitutional rights of sports fishermen to catch, kill and eat whatever takes their fancy.

But at least the Commissioner has a shiny new boat to keep an eye on things.

While, given that the supply of biennial reports seemed to have dried up in the early 1970's, I am none the wiser about the cod catch collapse.

References

Reference 1: https://www.maine.gov/dmr/commercial-fishing/landings/documents/cod.table.pdf.

Reference 2: https://www.maine.gov/dmr/commercial-fishing/.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_fish.