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Cod, Boats and a Growing Appetite for Fish

Grade 8 argument practice: world fish data and a harbor town's cod records show how population growth and rising demand change ocean ecosystems.

Grade 8ScienceInteractive · Printable

Aligned toMS-ESS3-4

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What’s included

Single worksheet
Auto-graded online
1 NGSS standard
Printable answer key
10 questions
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Details

Format: Interactive · Printable
Grade: Grade 8
Subject: Science
Question types: Fill in the blank, Multiple choice, Circle the answer, Short answer

About this worksheet

What students practice

Students analyze world data on population and fish eaten per person to explain rising demand.
Students argue from local fishing records how heavy fishing and catch limits changed a cod population.

How to use

Have students study both tables before reading the questions, and ask what changed in the bay and what stayed the same in the protected cove.

Curriculum

NGSS standard covered

MS-ESS3-4

Argue how growth in human population and resource use affects Earth's systems.

Preview

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Cod, Boats and a Growing Appetite for Fish

Use world and local fishing records to argue how human demand changes ocean life.

Part 1: The world's appetite for fish

Read the passage and Table 1, then answer questions 1–4.

What Happened to the Cod in Carrick Bay?

1For the school news site, eighth grader Eamon Kealoha is writing a story about the cod in Carrick Bay. Older fishers in his town of Port Carrick remember boats coming back loaded with cod. By 2000, many boats came back nearly empty. That year the town council closed most of the bay to cod fishing and set a yearly catch limit, which is still in place. Eamon wanted to know what had changed.

2First he looked at the world picture. A report from a world food agency gave the numbers in Table 1: world population, the average amount of fish eaten per person each year and the total fish eaten, including farmed fish. The same report says the share of the world's fish stocks that are fished faster than they can refill rose from about 10% in 1974 to about 35% in 2019. A fish stock is one population of one kind of fish in one area.

3Next, the harbor's fishery officer, Ms. Greta Solberg, gave Eamon the local records in Table 2. Each year, a research boat surveys the bay with the same nets at the same spots to estimate the total mass of adult cod. Port Carrick's fleet grew in the 1970s and 1980s as demand for fish rose, and newer boats carried sonar that finds schools of fish. Cod are slow to replace themselves, because a young cod usually takes several years to grow big enough to spawn.

4Ms. Solberg also shared surveys from Hollis Cove, 30 km up the coast, where the water temperature and food supply are much like Carrick Bay's. Hollis Cove has been a protected area with no fishing since 1975. In every survey since then, its adult cod have measured between about 1,800 and 2,200 t.

5Some changes reach beyond the cod. Nets dragged along the bottom stir up mud and break up the seafloor where young fish hide, and a bigger fleet burns more diesel fuel. Since the limit began, several Port Carrick crews have started farming mussels on ropes in the bay. Mussels filter their food out of the seawater, so the farms do not need fish feed.