Cod fed most of the people of Western Europe.

We hear a lot about the collapse of cod.

Little blue cod swimming in for a dash of color.

They give birth inside the ice, and they feed on the Arctic cod that live under the ice.

That's why the Prime Minister went on television. He said, This has left us all with a very big haddock.

It fed the slaves brought to the Antilles, the song Jamaica Farewell Ackee rice salt fish are nice is an emblem of the importance of salt cod from northeastern Canada.

Even in Newfoundland where we used to catch cod, we now have a jellyfish fishery.

And the cod are there because they are feeding on all the copepods and amphipods.

It's difficult to imagine that two, or some historians would say three world wars were fought during the colonial era for the control of cod.

But they're forcing themselves to come up in these tiny little ice holes where they can breathe, catch a breath, because right under that ice are all the swarms of cod.

A thousand years ago, the Norse settlers of my home city of York ate cod that weighed as much as eight kilograms. We know this from archaeologists and the fascination they have for medieval waste heaps.

Today s marine environment is truly under siege. When the explorer John Cabot sailed off the coast of Newfoundland more than 500 years ago, vast shoals of cod slowed down his ships crews could lower buckets over the side and fill them with fish.

Indeed, there is evidence from many fisheries of earlier maturation such changes take place fast enough to be detected over the decades. For example, early in the twentieth century, you would not find a mature cod in the North Sea less than about 50 centimeters in length, whereas by the 1980's mature cod were as small as 15 centimeters.

For example, spiny dogfish is partly substituting for cod in many European fish and chip shops. Sharks, too, are suffering from rapidly rising demand for shark fin soup, which is considered a delicacy in many parts of Asia.

A moderate level of fishing mortality brings the number of survivors down to about one hundred individuals. But the levels of fishing mortality we have been applying over the last twenty years bring the number of survivors down to about three.

Yet left to their own devices, cod are thought to live for at least thirty years. It is a testament to the great efficiency with which we exploit living marine resources that fish like cod are now much more likely to die at the hands of fishermen than for all other reasons put together, once they get into the fisheries.

If only one change in the prevailing mindset could be made, it should be to realize that, in the case of fish like cod, big is beautiful. To reconstruct our approach to fisheries management with measures that increase the survival of large, old individuals would be good for the health of our stocks in the short term and would be appreciated by our descendants.