Atlantic cod Totally Explained

Everything about The Atlantic Cod totally explained

The Atlantic cod, Gadus morhua, is a well-known food fish belonging to the family Gadidae. It grows to two metres (6 1/2 feet) in length. Sexual maturity is attained between ages 2 to 4. Coloring is brown to green on the dorsal side, shading to silver ventrally. Its habitat ranges from the shoreline down to the continental shelf.
In the western Atlantic Ocean cod has a distribution north of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and round both coasts of Greenland; in the eastern Atlantic it's found from the Bay of Biscay north to the Arctic Ocean, including the North Sea, areas around Iceland and the Barents Sea, which is the most important feeding area.
Several cod stocks collapsed in the 1990s (declined by >95% of maximum historical biomass) and have failed to recover even with the cessation of fishing. With the large predatory fish removed, their prey has had a population explosion and have become the top predators.

Alternative explanations and solutions

Debbie MacKenzie has presented an alternative explanation of the collapse of the cod stocks of the Grand Banks and beyond (External Link

). According to MacKenzie, sustained massive overfishing by drag-trawlers has depleted the nutrient cycle of a closed ecosystem (surface plankton, schools of fish, bottom-feeders and dwellers). The depletion of biomass leaves the ocean starving, and lack of growth leaves unfixed carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The ocean of evidence is in surface plankton depletion at the base of the food chain, a dearth of filter-feeders in favour of seaweed fed on nitrogen-loaded water, to the loss of bottom-feeders, cod and pelagic fish which were at the top of the food chain. The solution is: i) to stop strip-mining the ocean floor with destructive dragnets, ii) to feed the remaining fish with food, not the suffocating waste from sewage and chemical fertilizer polluted estuaries that causes pseudo-eutrophication, and most importantly iii) to enforce the regulation of commercial fishing very effectively.

Population tracking

Cod populations or stocks can differ significantly both in appearance and biology. For instance, the cod stocks of the Baltic Sea are adapted to low-salinity water. Organisations such as the Northwest Atlantic Fishery Organization (NAFO) and ICES divide the cod into management units or stocks; however these units are not always biologically distinguishable stocks. Some major stocks/management units on the Canadian/US shelf are (see map

of NAFO areas) are the Southern Labrador-Eastern Newfoundland stock (NAFO divisions 2J3KL), the Northern Gulf of St. Lawrence stock (NAFO divisions 3Pn4RS), the Northern Scotian Shelf stock (NAFO divisions 4VsW), which all lie in Canadian waters, and the Georges Bank and Gulf of Maine stocks in United States waters. In the European Atlantic, there are numerous separate stocks: on the shelves of Iceland, the coast of Norway, the Barents Sea, the Faroe Islands, off western Scotland, the North Sea, the Irish Sea, the Celtic Sea and in the Baltic Sea.

Lifecycle

The northwest Atlantic populations spawn in the winter and early spring at Georges Bank in the Cape Cod region.

Further Information

Get more info on 'Atlantic Cod'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://atlantic_cod.totallyexplained.com">Atlantic cod Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.