We need comprehensive research on the vibrant yet little understood Arctic ecosystems, which are home to rich fisheries of salmon, cod and char, and habitat for beluga whales, golden eagles and spotted seals.
Likewise, Hilborn and Minte-Vera (2008) demonstrated that the size selectivity in experiments is unrealistically strong compared with the real fisheries of Atlantic cod (Fig. 1 in Hilborn and Minte-Vera 2008).
For example, fisheries of northwest Atlantic cod resulted, between the mid 1950s and the early 1990s, in estimated declines in age at 50% maturity from 6.5 7.0 to 5.0 5.5 years, resulting in an estimated reduction of population growth by 25 30% (Hutchings and Fraser 2008).
The greatest and most ancient of all the mass fisheries, the fantastic swarming of cod off Newfoundland that European fleets fished for at least 500 years, was finally closed in 1992.
Yet the authors marshal clear examples of ecological disasters that have already had serious effects on human society: the collapse of cod fisheries in the North Atlantic, for instance, and the outbreaks of mountain pine beetles that are devastating forests in the West.
Caribbean salt flowed north to the cod fisheries of New England and Newfoundland's Grand Banks where it was used in prodigious quantities to preserve the cod harvest.
Bycatch of red king crab (Paralithodes camtschaticus) is a severe problem in the coastal fishery for cod (Gadus morhua) in the Barents Sea.
The collapse of the cod fisheries of Canada and New England has been well documented.
The North Atlantic cod fishery has caused the evolution of cod that mature smaller and younger than they did 40 years ago.
Some species, such as the barn door skate, have been inadvertently overfished nearly to extinction as a consequence of bycatch in fisheries targeting cod and redfish.
