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The North Atlantic Cod Collapse
The 1992 Canadian cod fishery collapse — the canonical case of maximum-sustainable-yield management producing catastrophic regime shift from which recovery has not occurred.
The North Atlantic cod fishery was managed for maximum sustainable yield for decades. The management was sophisticated, the models detailed, the harvest levels calibrated to extract maximum economic return while maintaining productive population levels. By every metric the management system measured, the fishery was performing well. Then, in the early 1990s, the cod population collapsed — not declined, collapsed, to approximately one percent of historical levels. The fishery was closed in 1992. Three decades later it has not recovered. The case became the canonical empirical demonstration of the resilience-efficiency tradeoff at its most severe: optimization succeeding by its metrics while accumulating vulnerability to a regime shift that the metrics could not detect.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The collapse occurred because the management regime had optimized for efficiency under the assumption that conditions would remain within the range the models specified. The models did not account for the possibility that the system could shift to a qualitatively different state — a state in which