HENRY

Erik Stokstad in ScienceNOW:

For Atlantic cod, overfishing is the bad gift that keeps on giving. Once a mainstay of fishing fleets, cod began to thin out in the 1960s. Today, their numbers—and the fish themselves—remain small, despite a moratorium on fishing established in 1993. Now, a study of the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada might explain why. Researchers report that because the largest and fastest-growing fish were harvested, cod have evolved to grow slowly—an adaptation that haunts them to this day.

Posted on February 1st, 2007 by Simon Greenhill