Before Newfoundland became a province of Canada, thousands of fishermen left the island to work on New England fishing boats. Many stayed to become citizens and raise families. After Confederation in 1949, the flow of Newfoundland immigrants slowed and the connection was not as strong.
Now the Fisheries and Marine Institute at Memorial University in St. John’s is forging new fisheries links between the two places through a series of collaborations with fishermen, government agencies and private industry.
“We’ve been working with New England for at least a decade,” said Glen Blackwood, director of the Centre for Sustainable Aquatic Resources at the Marine Institute. “And we’re working on solving problems not creating them.” Among its many projects, the Centre tests nets and gear for impact on the seabed and avoidance of bycatch.
One of the Centre’s projects is working with the U.S. federal fisheries agency to develop a new low-impact, selective trawl net.
All New England states and the province of Newfoundland and Labrador have experienced serious problems in their fisheries in recent decades, the biggest of which was the total collapse of the 500-year-old, fabled Newfoundland cod fishery, mostly shut down in 1992. The Northern cod particularly, shows no signs of rebuilding to commercial levels.
“The fisheries of this century will be different from the fisheries of the last century,” said Blackwood. “They’ll be focused on conservation, not exploitation.” Last May, the Centre hosted a contingent from New England for a workshop at the Centre’s Flume Tank, the largest in the world, built in 1988 for testing gear. In it, 1.7 million liters of water can be controlled at variable speeds to test scaled-down models of nets and doors in order to monitor their performance and accurately the predict the behavior of the full-sized gear in the ocean.
This group was not the first to travel to St. John’s, led by Dr. Pinguoe He, a fisheries researcher at the University of New Hampshire. “He’s driving a lot of work being done in the U.S.,” said Blackwood. Pinguoe, a native of China, worked at the respected Scottish research lab in Aberdeen before moving to the U.S.
UNH is the home of the New England Consortium, a group that attracts grants, then funds industry research, including some collaborative workshops with the Centre. Besides workshops and testing at the Flume Tank, some of the dozen staff members at the Centre travel to New England to conduct workshops with fishermen, including one at a recent conference in Rhode Island.
“At least every six months, we consult with Fisheries Products International” in Massachusetts, said Blackwood. “FPI has won awards for their work with sustainable fisheries, especially on bycatch issues and seabed-friendly trawl gear.”
FPI is a large seafood company headquartered in Newfoundland with U.S. headquarters in Danvers, Mass. FPI either brings Centre staff to New England or sends FPI marketing staff to St. John’s for regular updating on sustainability “just to increase their knowledge.”
The Centre’s work with NOAA Fisheries in Woods Hole, Mass. began two years ago after “Trawlgate,” when fishermen discovered the gear aboard one of NOAA’s research vessels was operating improperly. NOAA hired the Centre to do independent testing of the gear to help determine whether the 30-year-old gear seriously affected the agency’s stock evaluations. Now the Centre continues to work with NOAA to develop new and better nets and gear for use aboard NOAA’s new research vessel, the BIGELOW, which will be launched within the next two years. “We’ve done gear standards for existing trawls and we’re in model construction for the new survey trawl,” said Blackwood. The Centre performed the same function 10 years ago for the Canadian government’s research gear.
The Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences also works closely with the Centre on bycatch and conservation issues, including research on yellowtail flounder for FPI using underwater cameras. “We find our guys are all linked, so we don’t reinvent the wheel. We have a lot of collaborations with Chris Glass (director at Manomet), gear manufacturers, Cliff Goudey at MIT Sea Grant and Pingoue, and they’re connected.”
Other New England companies working with the Centre include Reidars Manufacturing, a New Bedford gear maker, Trawlworks out of Point Judith, Rhode Island, and Aquamesh/Riverdale, the Massachusetts maker of wire mesh and lobster traps. Superior Trawl in Rhode Island is working with the Centre on a new, selective haddock trawl. “We’re involved with working out a wire mesh crab pot that will be like the transition of lobster pots from wood to mesh,” said Blackwood.
Since the Newfoundland cod fishery collapsed, the snow crab stocks have increased and this valuable fishery has more than replaced the monetary value of cod to the province. However, the crab fishery employs far fewer people and being located further offshore, means fewer ports and only vessels larger than traditional inshore cod boats have access to it. “Now the pot is a metal frame with twine stretched over it,” said Blackwood. “We’re doing a lot of testing for bycatch and selectivity. Mesh size issues need to be worked out.”
“It’s very much a partnership in New England,” Blackwood explained. “Sometimes they pay for our tank, sometimes we pay to use their facilities. Sometimes they send people to us, sometimes we go to them.” The Centre is looking beyond New England as well. Staff members already work with the Maritime provinces in Canada, but they’re now receiving inquiries from Alaska and Mexico. “We’re very busy. Most days we’re spread as thin as peanut butter,” said Blackwood. “We’re looking to hire new people.”
Blackwood, a marine biologist, said he started out “to be Jacques Cousteau” but then realized the power was in fisheries management, so he took his master’s in that field. He went on to work as an assistant minister in the provincial fisheries department for 17 years before moving to the Canadian Center for Fisheries Innovation. Four years ago, he joined the Centre.
Blackwood is excited about another collaboration called Bridges. “The idea is to build a bridge between folks between the U.S. and Newfoundland, New England, the Southwest, Alaska … ,” he said. “It’s an organization set up with offshore technical funds to allow facilities like the flume tank to bridge the geographical challenge. We’re booked 20 days a year for Newfoundlanders, but the capacity of that facility to solve problems in other places is great.”
The $200,000 (Canadian) in offshore technical funds are a combination of federal and provincial money. Bridges was created less than two years ago, a Canadian equivalent of the New England Consortium. “We work on fisheries problems, but we’re limited by the number of people we have. This project will help.”
“Mankind has been fishing the oceans for thousands of years, and for the past 50 years, exploitation has been a big issue. We’ve seen the collapse of big fisheries, such as Northern cod and we’re working to see this doesn’t happen again,” said Blackwood, who doesn’t expect the work to be easy or quick. “If there was an easy solution, someone would have found it.”