🦈 Seals, Sharks & a Changing Cape Cod

Lately, almost every week at farmers markets and community events, someone asks about seals and sharks, and how all of this fits into the seafood we harvest. It's a great question, and it's a complicated one.

There's no doubt that gray seals have made a remarkable population boom since gaining federal protection in the 1970s. And it's also helped make Cape Cod a haven for great white sharks. For those of us who've worked on the water for decades, the change has been striking.

I remember monomoy in the late 1990s, seeing just a handful of seals. A few years later, hundreds. And now, thousands. It's been incredible to watch. For fishermen, seals can be a tough subject. It's not hard to understand why. Seals eat fish. They interact with gear. They damage catch. And when fishermen spend thousands of hours on the water watching that happen, yet often feel that the public conversation focuses only on reducing what humans harvest, it's understandable that there'd be some frustration.

The science community, on the other hand, tend to be cautious. They acknowledge seals eat a lot, but also point out how hard it is to quantify exactly how much and what that means for any one fish population. Fish populations are shaped by a web of factors. Fishing pressure, habitat, water temperature, climate change, predator-prey dynamics. Untangling that web is just- downright difficult. As fisheries scientist John Magnuson once said, "Fisheries science isn't rocket science. Its much more complex."

For me, its obvious that seals are eating from a range of what our marine ecosytem provides. And they eat a lot! Zooming out and looking beyond the fisheries, generally speaking, when you see a top predator thriving, its usually a sign of a pretty healthy ecosystem. So maybe we can all agree that our waters surrounding Cape Cod are doing pretty good?

At Chatham Harvesters, we believe the path forward isn't about arguing over incomplete answers. It's about building better ones together. Fishermen bring thousands of hours of observation. Scientists bring rigorous methods. When those perspectives work together, not against each other, we get closer to the truth. Our co-op president, Captain Doug, has been deeply involved in collaborative research for the past decade along with other fishermen from the co-op. Moving forward we aim to continue deepening our involvement because we need to see a thriving ecosystem now and into the future.