World fishing history study planned Gulf of Maine to be included in 10-year project funded by $1.2 million grant

BOSTON – Scientists who hope to learn from the history of fish life prior to the industrial age don’t have the option. That history has never been written.

The best records are centuries old, scattered among sources of varying reliability and often buried in the books of ancient bureaucracies.

Now, a group of historians and scientists plans to put the pieces together to construct the previously untold world history of fishing.

The project, funded with a $1.2 million grant, will draw from sources ranging from ancient Danish tithing records to Colonial-era commerce books. It aims to fill in the blanks about the species and the men that have filled plates and coffers for centuries.

Project leaders hope compiling the history will help lead to more realistic approaches to regulation today, and offer clues about the collapse of a resource once thought inexhaustible.

“It’s exciting to fill in a picture we’ve been trying to fill in for years,” said Andrew Rosenberg, a University of New Hampshire researcher leading the project’s Gulf of Maine study.

The project grew out of a talk between Woods Hole-based fisheries scientist Tim Smith and Poul Holm, a historian from Southern Denmark University, at a 1999 conference on the history of ocean studies in St. Petersburg, Russia.

It became clear to them that the traditional lack of communication between historians and ecologists wasn’t helping either side.

Historians have focused too much on man’s influence on the sea, ignoring nature’s workings, Holm said.

Ecologists, meanwhile, are limited to analyzing trends based on the last 50 years, when they have reliable data about fish stocks.

“We learned a lot quickly, just sitting there,” Smith said.

The 10-year history project is funded by a grant announced in February from the Alfred Sloan Foundation, and is part of a larger global study called the Census of Marine Life. It includes seven case studies from global regions ranging from southwest Africa to the Gulf of Maine.

Participants include researchers from the universities of New Hampshire, Washington, and Hull, England, and Southern Denmark University, as well as the U.S. government.

Fishermen and their communities will be studied, but the main focus will be the fish themselves, Holm said.

“We’re trying to look at it from nature’s perspective,” he said. “Man has lived off the sea for thousands of years. … Just as we need to understand mineral resources, you need to understand the resources of the sea.”

Longtime assumptions about the fishery could be destroyed along the way.

Regulators, for instance, often imagine that a “pristine” ocean world existed prior to the heavy fishing that began in the 1950s, and they’d like to return the ocean to that state, Smith said. But that pristine state never existed, he said. Natural prey-predator cycles and constant weather changes have kept the system in constant flux, he said.

Historical records could provide a picture of the condition of fish stocks before heavy fishing by man, and result in more realistic recovery goals, Holm said.

Too often, he said, regulators hope to fix what was broken by rebuilding what was never there and ignoring natural cycles, Holm said.

“This is not a house. This is a huge system,” he said.

Filling in hundreds of years of history for a mobile, underwater species won’t be easy. The data just don’t exist for some species in certain areas, and numbers are sparse for others, Smith said.

“The game we’re playing is to choose systems where there’s enough information where you can connect the dots, and get a picture,” Smith said.