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Place 07 · The Northeast Coast · Chapter 5 of 7
The Fish That Built New England
In 1602 an English captain caught so many cod off Massachusetts that his crew threw fish back overboard and he renamed the place Cape Cod; four centuries later, New England’s cod are still waiting to recover.
About 15 minutes · 1 video · 1 live data chart · 2 quick activities
Start here
Four hundred years of fish
Atlantic cod paid for much of colonial New England: salted, dried and shipped across the Atlantic. A cod can live more than 20 years, reach 51 inches and 77 pounds, and a big female can release up to 9 million eggs at a time. It seemed impossible to run out, and that is exactly the kind of thinking Place 02’s sardines should have cured us of.
Watch this
See it move
NOAA Fisheries — Changing Ocean Temperatures & Atlantic Cod. Four minutes with a NOAA fisheries oceanographer on why New England’s cod are struggling to bounce back even after the fishing slowed down. Spoiler: it starts with the babies’ lunch.
While you watch, look for
- What young cod eat, and why warmer water can leave them hungry
- Why fewer fishing boats has not been enough to bring cod back
- Something you did not expect. Hold onto it.
The short version
Three things going on here
The boom
Vacuuming the banks
From the 1950s and 60s, factory freezer trawlers, floating fish plants that could stay at sea for months, swept the fishing banks from Newfoundland to New England. Between 1965 and 1975, foreign fleets caught more fish off US coasts than American boats did; Senator Warren Magnuson said they were “virtually vacuuming the seas.” In 1976 the US claimed a 200-nautical-mile fishing zone, and Canada did the same in 1977: the EEZ from Place 06.
The bust
The day the fishery closed
Pushing the foreign fleets out did not stop the overfishing: local fleets simply grew. Off Newfoundland, the northern cod’s spawning stock fell about 93% between 1962 and 1992, and in July 1992 Canada closed the fishery, putting about 30,000 people in the province out of work. In December 1994 large areas of Georges Bank were closed off New England too.
The comeback
Scallops fast, cod slow
Protect a stock and it can recover: Atlantic sea scallops, declared overfished in 1997, became the first US stock declared rebuilt, in 2001, and are now the world’s largest wild scallop fishery. Canada’s northern cod reached its healthy zone in 2026 for the first time since 1992, after 34 years. In New England, a 2024 scientific review found all four cod stocks still overfished, and warming water makes it harder for young cod to survive.
Photos: Andreas Berget, Neriman Özaydın, Elzaproart / Pexels
Play with it
Five hundred years of cod on one chart
This chart from Our World in Data shows an estimate of how much northern Atlantic cod was caught off Newfoundland and Labrador every year from 1508 to 2019. Hover along the line: find the slow centuries, the sudden peak, and the cliff.
Interactive chart: Our World in Data, “Five centuries of cod catches in Eastern Canada,” from Schijns et al. (2021).
Two questions to answer while you are in there
- In what year was the catch highest, and roughly how big was it? How many years later did the fishery close?
- For about 400 years the catch stayed fairly steady. What changed in the 1950s and 60s that could take so many more fish so quickly?
Try it yourself
Check yourself
Try it
What Sank the Cod?
Click every word that names a cause of the cod collapse, and leave the rest alone.
Try it · interactive
Cod Quota
Run a New England cod fishery year by year: set the catch, watch the stock grow or crash compared with the maximum sustainable yield, switch on warming, and find out how long a recovery really takes.
Open Cod Quota in its own window (opens in a new tab).
Words you will hear
Four terms, that is all
Stock
One population of a fish species, managed together
Overfishing
Catching fish faster than they can reproduce
Maximum sustainable yield
Largest catch a stock can supply every year
Quota
Legal limit on how much may be caught
Check your understanding
Practice the whole chapter
Everything in this chapter, in eight quick questions. Retry as often as you like. Read the feedback on every answer, right or wrong, because that is where the learning is.
Practice
Practice: The Fish That Built New England
Eight questions covering the video, the three cards, the four terms and the interactive above.
If you want more
Go deeper
- Oceanography 101 (MiraCosta) 17.6 — Biological Resources — LibreTexts · 6 minutes
- Heritage Newfoundland & Labrador — Cod Moratorium — Heritage NL · 6 minutes
- NOAA Fisheries — Magnuson-Stevens Act at 50 — NOAA · 6 minutes
Photo credits (Pexels): Julia Barthold, Kindel Media, Andreas Berget, Neriman Özaydın, Elzaproart.