Cod Research Paper

To the everyday individual, cod is simply a fish often found in the supermarket or on the menu at your local surf and turf restaurant. However, to a historian this fish still is and was an influential natural resource that significantly influenced the history and progression of societies throughout the world as described in Mark Kurklansky’s novel, Cod. Not only did cod have a vast past of shaping the history of man through its impact on economic, political and social systems, but it also developed an interdependent relationship with man in which humans played a noteworthy role in likewise shaping the future of the fish itself.
The influence cod had on the governments and political systems of countries that heavily relied on the fish to sustain
Fish farming became common throughout nations in hopes that it would “give nature a hand” in increasing cod’s numbers . Such farming entailed rearing the fish in pens and “fattening the cod with mackerel, herring, and capelin,” resulting in an increase in the size and potential fertility of cod . However, this human intervention to replenish the bounty of cod in the waters came at the price of negatively biologically affecting the fish itself, permanently changing the nature of farmed cod. As more and more cod were farmed, it became apparent to scientists that the farmed fish were bred and negatively endowed with characteristics that would more likely selected against by nature compared to their wild cod counterparts. For instance, “if a [farmed] cod was not disease resistant, did not know how to avoid predators, lacked hunting or food-gathering skills, had a faulty thermometer and did not produce the antifreeze protein or the ability to detect a change in water temperature that signals the moment to move inshore for spawning,” there would be a significant likelihood that it would not successfully survive in nature and would likely reproduce offspring with the same detrimental genes when mating with wild cod . A notable imbalance between nature and man was created through the development of farm fishing, which had essentially stripped cod from its natural state and drastically altered the potential of any future back in the wild for farmed