Now that redfish’s fortunes have improved, McKinnon, who is retired, still looks at a reopened fishery with some trepidation if it’s going to happen, he says, it should be done with caution. But for the redfish fishery, it wouldn’t have mattered the fishery was closed two years later, in 1995, and with it went many of the remaining jobs in groundfish fishing and processing that had existed across the region. Local processing came to a halt in 1993, when the Usen plant, once the town’s largest employer, burned down. Some fishers feared the increased catch was devastating the redfish population, but the economics of the fishery-including the fact that it was happening at a time when fishers’ incomes in the region as a whole were declining-made it hard to shift course. ![]() Then, as the industry shifted to midwater trawling, a more efficient gear type, catch rates doubled. Sometimes, he says, the boats, rigged for bottom trawling, seemed to bring in loads of redfish where more fish were forked over the side-non-target species, as well as undersized redfish-than were put in the hold. “We knew when we were doing it,” he says. Even decades later, as he stands outside his equipment shed on Mackinnon Point Road-the family seat a short drive from the wharf-reflecting on whether the fishing was sustainable, McKinnon’s conclusion is immediate. Half a century ago, PEI fisherman Justin McKinnon harvested redfish out of Souris, delivering loads to the Usen plant. The main processing plant, Usen Fisheries, burned down just two years before the redfish fishery was closed in 1995. Souris, Prince Edward Island, was once a major site of redfish processing in Atlantic Canada. One notable thing about this view, though, is what’s not in it: the Usen Fisheries plant, once a major site of redfish processing in the region. Lawrence, while refrigerated trucks trundle away from the port, passing an ice cream shack and a Christmas tree made of lobster traps. ![]() Cars line up for the five-hour ferry ride across the Gulf of St. On a Monday afternoon, the harbor in the seaside town of Souris, Prince Edward Island (PEI)-a town whose website highlights such historical moments as a 1724 plague of mice and a temporary economic windfall from the oil generated out of 50 beached whales in 1925-is bustling. And because redfish is a species that’s returned from the brink, the specter of failure hangs over this process: 30 years after collapse, have we learned enough to have this do-over go differently? With this optimism, the return of redfish has also brought complications, not only in parsing the reasons for the population boom, but in determining how the benefits of that boom can be distributed. In Eastern Canada, harvesters and scientists have begun to hope that a fish the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada designated endangered as recently as 2010 will soon support one of the largest redfish fisheries in the world. Lawrence that were once fished so intensively they were put under a moratorium are now making a heroic-if mysterious-comeback: a return measured not in one fish or two fish, but in the millions of tonnes. More to the point: aside from readers of Dr. Redfish-a deep-dwelling species found in the western Atlantic from Baffin Island to New Jersey-is an unlikely hero: a scarlet groundfish the length of a bulldog sporting a faintly outraged expression and a line of spines sharp enough to draw blood. ![]() Lawrence, an exception to the rule is emerging from the depths. ![]() Even decades after overfishing drove seemingly inexhaustible species like Atlantic cod off a precipice, many populations-most notably, of Atlantic cod-have remained stubbornly low.īut in Canada’s Gulf of St. In the North Atlantic, the trajectory following fisheries collapse has not been forgiving. Listen now, download, or subscribe to “Hakai Magazine Audio Edition” through your favorite podcast app. This article is also available in audio format. Stream or download audio For this article Authored byįebru| 3,100 words, about 15 minutes Share this article Photo by RLS Photo/Shutterstock In Cod’s Shadow, Redfish Rise Thirty years after the population collapsed, the Atlantic redfish fishery is poised to reopen, providing a second chance at a sustainable fishery. While the cod are yet to recover, redfish populations are booming. The collapse of both fisheries decimated coastal communities. The harvest of redfish, an Atlantic groundfish, was closed in 1995, just a few years after the closure of the northern cod fishery.
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