International Council for CM 2003/U:06 Exploration of the Sea The Scope and Effectiveness of Stock Recovery Plans in Fishery Management Recovering Canadian Atlantic Cod Stocks: The Shape of Things to Come?

Abstract Between 1989 and 1993 science advisors in Canada recommended major quota reductions for many Atlantic cod stocks. Government response to the advice was initially slow and insufficient to arrest the stock declines. Declines became collapses and complete closures had to be implemented for a number of fish stocks between 1992-1994. At the time of closure, expectations were widespread that it might require as many as 3-4 years for stocks to recover to states capable of supporting substantial fisheries. Those supporting such expectations were helped by some conventionally structured forecasts, which used the past as a guide to the future and implied a rapid recovery for the stocks. Projections with much more pessimistic messages were also provided at that time, but optimistic messages were the basis for much of the planning. The social assistance, industry restructuring, and science augmentation programs were all designed or adapted to extend a maximum of five years. The expectations were that by that time coastal communities and the industry would have restructured to prosper with more modest harvesting of recovered stocks, and that science would have the answers for why the stocks had collapsed. The last decade has been very different from those expectations. After five years of moratoria, stock recoveries were highly variable. A few stocks did return quickly to historic levels, but these were ones where the declines had been modest at the time that moratoria were instituted. Stocks that had declined severely showed evidence of very weak improvement at best. However, when funding for social assistance programs was exhausted, fisheries were reopened. Although TACs were very small compared to historic harvests, the very modest stock gains during the moratoria were rapidly dissipated. Moreover, the social and community needs for fishing were still present and the restructuring and retraining funds had not resulted in reduced capacity and demand for fish. Therefore the reintroduction of moratoria in 2003 have been resisted just as strongly on the grounds of social and economic impacts, although the states of these stocks are as poor or poorer than in the early 1990s. The big difference is that this time there are no expectations than things will get better in the near future. There are a number of lessons to be learned from this experience. Based on an examination of 47 alternative hypotheses for why these cod stocks did not recover strongly through the 1990s, it was a suite of biological and fishery properties, and not just bad luck that led to the failures of stocks to recover. Stock recovery trajectories based on productivity measured when a stock is healthy were a misleading guide to 1 true stock trajectories of depleted stocks. The paper documents some of the ways in which productivity of the depleted Canadian cod stocks differed from productivity of the same stocks when they were large. It will apply some of the lessons learned from the Canadian experience to the general theme of recovery planning

Genetic structure of the lumpfish Cyclopterus lumpus across the North Atlantic

AbstractLumpfish, or lumpsucker, Cyclopterus lumpus (Linnaeus, 1758) is widely distributed in the North Atlantic Ocean. It has a considerable economic value and substantial fisheries occur in several North Atlantic regions owing to the use of its fully ripe internal egg masses in the ovaries as an alternative to sturgeon caviar. Despite being intensively fished in several locations, biological knowledge is limited and no genetic structure information is available. In this study, the stock structure of C. lumpus was investigated across the North Atlantic using ten microsatellite loci. Out of ten loci, two exhibited higher level of differentiation but their inclusion/exclusion from the analyses did not drastically change the observed genetic pattern. A total of three distinct genetic groups were detected: Maine–Canada–Greenland, Iceland–Norway and Baltic Sea. These results, discussed in terms of origin of differentiation, gene flow, and selection, showed that gene flow was rather limited among the detected groups, and also between Greenland and Maine–Canada.</jats:p