Gulf of Maine fishermen, who pushed for the study, are hoping the study will help explain why their nets are bulging with cod where scientists say there should be nothing. The Gulf of Maine is a fishery battleground. Fishermen from Provincetown to Maine were envious that Georges Banks fishermen were allowed to catch up to 2,000 pounds of cod a day. They want evidence that the Georges Bank cod and the Gulf of Maine cod are separate stocks and want to determine to what extent they intermingle. If Georges Bank cod are migrating and replacing Gulf of Maine cod, or if they are actually the same stock of fish, then some fisherman believe the fish stocks should not be managed separately with different quotas.
Fish tend to come together in large concentrations around spawning time.
They collect around big underwater formations like the sunken land mass that makes up Georges Bank. Currents swirling around the bank herd plankton and cod eggs together, guaranteeing the larvae with a food source when they hatch. Scientists hope that, with the help of fishermen, they will put 50,000 to 100,000 tags on codfish over the next few years. A similar program in Canadian waters put 22,000 tags on cod from 1984 to 1997. The UMass study incorporates temperature and water pressure sensitive tags along with T-bar tags.