Photo of the beach in Port Aransas, Texas

Schweppe Lecture Series

Dr. Kenneth T. Frank

Ocean Sciences Division, Bedford Institute of Oceanography

Thursday, June 13, 2002, 7:00 PM, Visitor Center Auditorium

Fisheries Collapses: Causes, Consequences and Recovery

In the early 1990s, there was a large-scale collapse of fish populations in the Northwest Atlantic that cast a dark cloud over the Canadian Atlantic fishery. The prominent environmentalist Dr. David Suzuki lamented that “Today, even with a moratorium on most of the Atlantic cod fishery, stocks are still plummeting towards extinction. Tens of thousands of jobs have already been lost and thousands of communities are being torn apart by an ecological apocalypse.” Did this dire scenario actually materialize? Both the economic and social impacts have been severe in areas that depended solely on the fishery. In several cases, however, new fisheries have appeared, and in other cases minor species have begun to flourish, so that negative economic impacts were brief. It appears that because cod are major predators of smaller fishes, shrimp, and crabs, the collapse of cod may have caused major changes in the marine food chain. This may be the silver lining in the dark cloud, and instead of an “ecological apocalypse” other species are now flourishing. Whether or not these alternative fisheries will be sustainable in the long term is an open question. Dr. Frank will review the collapse of the Atlantic cod fishery and explain how this story may be important to other fisheries.

Dr. Kenneth T. Frank is a Research Scientist for the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Oceanography at Dalhousie University. He spent 15 years in the Marine Fish Division at Bedford Institute of Oceanography where he was responsible for stock assessments of commercially important fish species. He has made important contributions to research in fishery science and resource conservation.

The free lecture will be held at 7 p.m. in the Visitor Center of the University of Texas Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas, and the public is invited to attend. Dr. Frank's visit to the Marine Science Institute is part of the Laura Randall Schweppe Endowed Lecture Series in Marine Science.

Modified:: Tue Apr 16 11:31:03 CDT 2002