Page 2 of 3

You begin your column by reminding readers of the collapse of Atlantic cod, claiming "the number of cod today is something like one percent of what it was in the 1960s." While that is a great rhetorical hook for readers, it is also a dated snapshot of those fisheries. The fact is that the cod stocks (there are two) in Georges Bank and Gulf of Maine are currently rebuilding spawning stock biomass to target levels.

You take a sunnier view than the reality warrants. The two fishing grounds you mention, both in U.S. waters, constitute a relatively small portion of the North American Atlantic cod fishery. The larger part is off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador; at its peak it was ten times the size of the Georges Bank and Gulf of Maine fisheries. The Newfoundland and Labrador fishery collapsed in the early 1990s and fell to less than 1 percent of the peak level. Professor Worm tells me in the last few years the stock may have risen to about 4 percent -- which, OK, is more than the "something like one percent" I cited initially -- but the offshore fishery remains closed. It would be foolish to call this modest improvement a recovery.

You blame the status of the cod stocks completely on "rapacious factory fishing" while the very latest science on the issue published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science suggests "a relationship between climate change and the decline of bottom species like cod."

You cite a single paper in support of this contention, presumably "The Response of Atlantic Cod (Gadus morhua) to Future Climate Change" by Kenneth Drinkwater (2005). Drinkwater discusses the possibility that colder waters may have caused cod off Newfoundland to migrate south around the time the fishery there collapsed in the early 1990s. Here's what Professor Worm had to say about this:

"I don't think anybody doubts that fishing was the major factor in the collapse of the northern cod fishery. It is true that the collapse happened during a time of cool temperatures, but the fact is that those 'missing' fish never turned up again. Stocks south of Newfoundland declined at the same time. Hutchings and Myers published a string of papers in the 1990s clearly showing that fishing was the only viable hypothesis for the collapse. I don't see any contrary evidence in the Drinkwater paper."

The reference to Boris Worm's 2006 paper ... is quite simply out of date -- because Worm himself has disavowed the conclusions of his own paper.

No, he hasn't. I quote Professor Worm: "The assertion that I have 'disavowed' my conclusions from 2006 is untrue. In fact, our new paper confirms independently the trend of increasing species collapse that we highlighted in 2009. What is true is that our new research has also shown that it is indeed possible to curb fishing pressure, and begin a process of rebuilding." I'll return to this in a moment.

Misidentifying fish for sale is about fraud, plain and simple, not about suppliers' inability to obtain certain fish to offer on the open market.

That's a narrow way of looking at it. While fraud is undoubtedly the immediate cause of much mislabeling, the underlying cause is dwindling supplies. As Jennifer L. Jacquet and Daniel Pauly ("Trade Secrets: Mislabeling and Renaming of Seafood," Marine Policy, 2008) put it: "Species are mislabeled because there is a shortage of the desired species or because the species itself was illegally caught (illegal, because there is a shortage). Species are renamed because an ever-growing demand for seafood creates new markets for fish that were once considered unmarketable (e.g., slimeheads, toothfish). Today's renaming and mislabeling is not only an indication of cheating, but is, fundamentally, an indication that global fisheries are in distress."

You suggest "less desirable fish" are finding their way onto restaurant menus because "increasingly that's all there is left." What evidence do you have to support this comment? . . . The top 10 most popular seafood species in the U.S. [are the traditional favorites, including] shrimp, canned tuna, salmon, Alaska pollock, tilapia, catfish, crab, cod, flatfish, and clams.

That salmon, cod, and the like remain popular with American consumers doesn't change the fact that these varieties have been badly overfished, as they famously have. The resulting scarcity of such longtime staples clearly helped open the door for once-scorned but now rebranded species like Chilean sea bass and monkfish, as well as easily farmable newcomers like tilapia. If you dispute this, you might want to take it up with the people at the trade magazine Seafood Business, where they're running articles like this one [LINK: http://www.seafoodbusiness.com/archives.asp?ItemID=3651&pcid=192&cid=193&archive=yes] suggesting that an up-and-comer fish called cobia is proving "a popular substitute for species that are overfished."