Future of Fisheries

Andy Rosenberg returns to Dalhousie where he got his PhD in 1984 to deliver the inaugural Ransom A. Myers lecture.

There was no one quite like Ransom Myers. Funny, curious and bright, he’d bustle through the Life Sciences Centre, balancing an armful of printouts, a sloshing coffee mug and his lunch, talking and gesturing as he walked along.

“Nobody comes to my office like that anymore,” says Boris Worm, who worked with the late Dr. Myers as a post-doc and then as a colleague.

His talent and passion were just as remarkable. Following Dr. Myers’s death a year and a half ago, his Dalhousie colleagues wanted to do something that would remind people of his legacy. They considered setting up a research chair in his name or a scholarship fund, and then decided upon an annual lecture series.

The inaugural lecture in the series takes place Friday, Oct. 3 at 7 p.m. in the Ondaatje Auditorium, Marion McCain Building. Andy Rosenberg, professor at the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space at the University of New Hampshire, will deliver the lecture, entitled The Future of Fisheries: Science, Policy and Societal Challenges. Dr. Rosenberg was a friend of Dr. Myers; they both studied for their PhDs at Dalhousie at the same time.

“We thought the lecture series would be the easiest to get off the ground and would reach the largest amount of people,” says Dr. Worm, a noted Dalhousie marine scientist. “Plus, it fits with Ram. He was a gifted scientist but an equally good communicator … for him, it was not enough to do the science. He believed scientists have an obligation to let the public know about what they find out.”

Dr. Myers shared with the world his concerns about global industrial fishing. In a study published in 2003, Dr. Myers, who held the first Killam Chair in Ocean Studies at Dalhousie University, found that global industrial fishing had cut populations of large fish, such as tuna, swordfish and marlin, to a mere 10 per cent of 1950 levels.

His output was prolific and continues to be: he has more than 150 published scientific papers to his credit, many documenting declining fish populations in the world’s oceans. Just days after his death on March 27, 2007, a study by Dr. Myers and Julia Baum was published in the journal Science reporting that the over-fishing of large predatory sharks was having a cascading effect throughout the food chain. Without predators to keep their numbers in check, the scientists noticed an explosion in numbers of rays, skates and smaller sharks, which in turn were feeding on diminishing numbers of scallops.

In October 2005, Fortune magazine declared Dr. Myers one of the top 10 people in the world to watch. His name made the list just behind presidential hopeful Barack Obama.