I read with interest your Jan. 8 editorial on the current state of the Atlantic Ocean. DFO science has been very wide off the mark in the past — the Harris report of 1993 concluded, because of faulty DFO science, that fishers caught five times as many fish as they should have.
With regard to climate change and the oceans, it is worth considering that although our waters are no longer a cod ocean, as is made clear in the reports you cite, they have indeed become a lobster ocean. Lobsters have replaced the cod as a keystone species, and their stocks have expanded dramatically.
These rapid ecological shifts are rarely stable and there are now indications that because of warming water temperatures, lobster catches are declining in southern New England. So it is not necessarily a “less productive sea,” as you conclude; it is a much different sea — less in the world of natural evolution, and more in the world of cultural evolution, like the rest of us.
Ray Rogers, Little Harbour, Shelburne County, associate professor, environmental studies, York University