Saint Pierre’s shore. Photo by Chantal Briand.
Destructive fishing practices and inadequate management allowed industrial fisheries operating in the waters of Saint Pierre and Miquelon to dump about 80,000 tonnes of fish back into the ocean from 1950 to 2022, with authorities failing to track the wasteful practice. This is enough fish to fill 32 Olympic-sized pools.
A recent study published in the journal Cybium and led by Sea Around Us researchers found that the French archipelago’s boats caught 1.2 times more fish than they reported. Most of the unreported portion of their catch consisted of industrial discards, with an important share also made up of the seafood caught to bait lines in the cod and other groundfish artisanal fisheries, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s.
“In an area that was deeply impacted by the crash of the Northern Atlantic cod stock in the late 1980s and the moratorium imposed in 1992 by Canadian authorities, which banned cod fishing along Canada’s east coast, uncovering a substantial amount of discards was surprising,” said Anna Luna Rossi, lead author of the paper, which was part of her master’s thesis with the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries.
Saint Pierre and Miquelon (SPM) is the last French territory in North America, located south-east of Newfoundland, and whose Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) is surrounded by the EEZ of Eastern Canada. Consequently, the cod moratorium meant the collapse of both its industrial and artisanal fishing sectors.
“SPM relied on cod fished by artisanal vessels called doris for about two centuries, before the introduction of the first trawlers in 1952,” Rossi said. “As soon as that happened, the data start showing a decrease in artisanal catches, with the last doris operating until 1992. Meanwhile, industrial catches rose from the 1950s to the 1970s, when they dropped a bit before peaking in the 1980s, thanks to an increase in fuel and equipment subsidies given by the French government to industrial fleets, who ended up putting more pressure on an already overexploited Atlantic cod stock.”
Saint-Pierre harbour, Saint-Pierre and Miquelon. Photo by Marc A. Cormier, Wikimedia Commons.
The depletion of the cod stock meant that quotas were set up in 1994, which led to a relative rebound of the industrial sector in the 1990s and almost steady catches up to the present.
“Artisanal fisheries, however, did not go back to fishing cod after the moratorium, instead focusing on snow crab and lumpfish, the latter exploited for its roe,” said Dr. Fabrice Teletchea, the SPM-born co-author of the study and an associate professor at the University of Lorraine. “They also catch a bit of capelin, but not as much as they used to between 1950 and 1992. Capelin was mostly kept by fishers themselves to consume it at home or to use it as bait. In fact, during that period, about 6,600 tonnes of capelin were used as bait and unaccounted for in official reports. This practice contributed to the depletion of a forage species that used to have a central role in local fisheries and culture.”
As small-scale fisheries began targeting other species, so did industrial fisheries.
In addition to snow crab and lumpfish, in the 2000s they started targeting sea cucumber, American lobster, and northern shortfin squid, solely within the Saint Pierre and Miquelon EEZ. Atlantic deep-sea scallops are also caught by industrial vessels.
“Where cod, haddock, and redfish used to make up the greatest part of the catch, local fisheries are now disproportionately reliant on species lower trophic level species. Fishing marine macroinvertebrates is not new: the shortfin squid fishery was predominant in SPM’s artisanal sector through the years,” said Dr. Daniel Pauly, principal investigator of the Sea Around Us and co-author of the study. “However, this shift from higher to lower trophic levels is a prime example of the concept of fishing down the marine food web, where fisheries progressively target smaller fish and invertebrates at lower trophic levels after depleting larger, high-value apex predators.”
According to Dr. Pauly, the removal of these predators threatens ecosystem resilience by disrupting food web dynamics, causing cascading effects on the rest of the food web and weakening the resilience of ecosystems.
“Moreover, with the increased effort put onto invertebrate species, pressure on their stocks rises, and this has proven to lead to overexploitation and potential collapse in sea cucumber species,” he said. “If not comprehensively managed in consideration of the lower resilience of invertebrate species, these lower-trophic level fisheries will likely be unsustainable for the local economy and the SPM marine ecosystem.”
The paper “Fishing reliance in a small archipelago: reconstructing the catches of Saint Pierre and Miquelon from 1950 to 2022” appeared in Cybium, https://doi.org/10.26028/cybium/2026-029