![]() "I've tried to translate between these two perspectives and identify an explanation for how this came to be," says Dean, whose survey of approximately 100 fishermen took place in 2018. "We're really not close at all," he says. Government scientists, on the other hand, say the Gulf of Maine cod stock has declined about 80% from 2005 to 2017 and is less than 5% of its target level, making it "severely depleted," Dean says. "The most common response we got from fishermen was that the population had gone up," he says. "We did a telephone survey and we asked commercial fishermen, over the last 10 years, do you think the cod population in the Gulf of Maine has gone down a lot, gone down a little, stayed the same, gone up a little or gone up a lot," Dean says. In a paper published recently by the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences-appropriately titled "Lost in Translation"-Dean says that fishermen and scientists view the ocean depths with such different lenses that they are literally not seeing the same things. While a doctoral student at Northeastern University, Dean believed he came up with an answer. The question of how fishermen and marine scientists employed by government agencies can view cod numbers so differently has puzzled Micah Dean, a marine biologist with the state of Massachusetts, for years. ![]() Scientists, on the other hand, say Atlantic cod stocks in the Gulf of Maine are severely depleted and possibly vulnerable to extinction. ![]()
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