Grey seals and cod used to be found in great abundance throughout the Baltic Sea, but today the seals are chiefly present in the northern parts of the sea while the cod is found in the south.

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Minister for Natural Environment Fisheries, Richard Benyon, has cautioned that the sustainability of mackerel in the future is at risk.

This calamity is already being called “Cod Wars II”.

The EU and Britain are on the brink of a serious trade battle with Iceland and the Faroe Islands after discussions about changing fishing quotas failed miserably.

Faroes and Iceland have both increased their fishing quotas substantially, and have basically up and walked out of discussions with the EU, which were supposed to find a middle ground agreeable to all concerned.

The other nations of the EU – including Britain, much to everyone’s surprise – are looking to take some extreme actions which might just force Iceland and the Faroes to limit the amount of mackerel they reel in.

There has already been talk of trade sanctions which would effectively ban the import of mackerel.

This is very much like the Cod Wars of the 50’s and 70’s, when Britain and Iceland were fighting over the rights to fish in the North Atlantic.

It got so serious that even the Royal navy was called in to put a stop to boats from Iceland who were getting in the way of the British trawlers.

But something needs to be done.. Both Iceland and the Faroes have given themselves quotas which are way larger than five years ago. So… There may be sanctions, or there may be interference with boats and fishing operations, whatever is going to happen, “Cod War II” promises to be very interesting indeed.

As reported earlier, fish populations may adapt and change in response to significant fishing pressure. Researchers are now suggesting that the genetic make-up of cod in the Atlantic Ocean might be changing, since cods genetically predisposition to seek out shallower waters are more likely to end up in nets or on fishing lines, while deep-dwellers are more likely to survive and reproduce.

If the current over-fishing of shallow living cod is not put to an end, evolutionary biologist Einar Árnason and his colleagues believes the genetic variant found in shallow-living cod will be lost all together. If the deep-water cods do not spread into the shallows, and Árnason doubts they will since they are adapted to deep water conditions, the shallows may be become devoid of cod within the next 10 years. This will decrease the size of the total cod population and will also force the fishing industry to either give up cod fishing altogether or switch to expensive deep-water trawling.

Árnason and his colleagues have studied cod populations off the coast of Iceland, where fish stocks are still in fairly decent condition compared to the severely depleted populations found in the western Atlantic. In their study, the researchers examined how the genotypes of Icelandic cod have changed between 1994 and 2003.

It was already known that cod living in the Icelandic shallows have a different variant of the pantophysin I gene than the cods found at much larger depts. In their study, Árnason and his colleagues found that the shallow-water variant of pantophysin I is becoming increasingly rare; a change which they attribute to the fact that most Icelandic cod fishers work in shallow waters near the coastline using lines and nets instead of carrying out deep-water trawling.

Árnason and his team also found that Icelandic cod are reaching sexual maturity at a younger age and at a smaller size than before. This is discovery is a chilling revelation for Icelandic fishermen and conservationalists alike, since that was exactly what happened in Newfoundland waters before that cod population crashed completely.

The study has been published in the journal PLoS ONE

After acknowledging the failure of current fishery policies within the union, EU officials are now considering banning the practice of discarding fish at sea.

“What’s the point of setting a quota if fishermen aren’t accountable for the fish they actually catch?” says Mogens Schou, a Danish fishery official.

The EU’s quotas limit the size of the annual catch that countries and their fleets can sell on their return to harbour, but instead of protecting remaining fishing populations from depletion, the system is making fishermen dump lower-value fish at sea to maximize profit. According to officials in the European Commission’s fisheries office, most of these fishes do not survive.

“To stay under their quotas, and make more money, fishermen discard half of what they catch,” says Schou, “They ‘high-grade’ – in other words, only keep the most profitable fish.”

Last month, an EU report was released highlighting the failure of current EU fishing regulations by showing that 88% of fish species in EU waters are being fished out faster than they can reproduce. In response to the report, fishery ministers from the 27 EU nations are currently discussing how to protect the remaining fish stocks from complete eradication.

As a part of these talks, Denmark has proposed an amended quota system where fishermen and their countries are held accountable for the amount of fish caught rather than the amount returned to port. To make it harder for fishing fleets to cheat, Denmark is also proposing that fishermen voluntarily equip their boats with on-board cameras. In exchange, the fishermen would get bigger quotas.

Denmark has already designed a surveillance kit consisting of four cameras, a GPS (Global Positioning System) device, and sensors that notice when fish is being hauled or dumped. The Danish kits are currently being used on six fishing boats with Danish officials monitoring the footage.

Danish fisherman Per Nielsen installed the kit on his trawler Kingfisher in September and believes it to be a good investment. The kit cost roughly 10,000 USD, but Nielsen was compensated by being allowed to catch several extra tens of thousands of dollars worth of cod.

As of now, EU fishermen throw overboard an estimated 50% of the fish they catch and did for instance dump 38% of the 24,000 tons of cod they caught last year, according to the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea.

Commercial, recreational and party/charter boat fishermen from Maine to North Carolina have all rallied together to deal with an out-of-balance population of predatory spiny dogfish sharks that threatens the recovery of New England groundfish and several others fish stocks living along the U.S. East Coast.

The newly formed Fishermen Organized for Rational Dogfish Management (FORDM) has requested the assistance of Dr. Jane Lubchenco, newly appointed National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration head, in dealing with the predator.

Spiny dogfish

The disproportionate abundance of dogfish is not a new problem; as early as 1992 Dr. Steven Murawski, now chief scientist of the National Marine Fisheries Service’s, wrote “Given the current high abundance of skates and dogfish, it may not be possible to increase gadoid (cod and haddock) and flounder abundance without ‘extracting’ some of the current standing stock.”

That was over 15 years ago and the situation has not improved. On the contrary, the amount of dogfish now exceeds that of skates, and dogfish comprises over half of all fish taken in the annual trawl surveys carried out by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center.

The spiny dogfish can exceed 150 cm in length and preys on virtually all species of fish smaller than itself. Dogfishes can also create a problem for other species by competing with them for prey fish.

This remarkable abundance of dogfish is most likely the result of countless years of ever increasing over-fishing. Spiny dogfish is not an appreciated food fish and the depletion of other species seems to have favoured it greatly in these waters.

According to WWF Canada, excessive bycatch* of cod is undermining the cod moratorium imposed in 1994. On the southern Grand Banks near Canada, cod bycatch is now at least 70 percent higher than target levels and this is hampering the recovery of one the world’s best known fisheries.

WWF Canada also states that ships from the European Union are responsible for the largest proportion of the overrun bycatch.

In 2003, bycatch amounts were estimated to be over 80 per cent of the remaining cod stock which caused WWF to push for a 2008 cod recovery strategy that included setting a bycatch reduction target of 40 per cent for the southern Grand Banks at the September 2007 annual meeting of the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO).

The 40 percent target level was based on estimations of how much the cod population could endure and still have at least some chance of recovery. 40 percent is equivalent of 420 tonnes of cod, but unofficial fishing statistics for the year 2008 show that almost twice as much, 713 tonnes, was caught as bycatch last year. Of these 713 tonnes, ships from the European Union member states accounted for 444 tonnes.

It should be noted that these figures does not account for misreported bycatch and illegal fishing.

WWF Canada is now urging NAFO to adopt an effective recovery plan for southern Grand Banks cod; one hat will include immediate bycatch reduction targets as well as long-term recovery goals. Gear-based solutions need to be combined with protection of spawning and nursery areas for the plan to be effective and the arrangements must naturally be backed by efficient monitoring and enforcement to have any effect. Such a recovery plan would be consistent with the Ecosystem management approach adopted in the newly revised NAFO Convention.

“Cod and other fish stocks can never recover as long as NAFO refuses to see the urgency of the bycatch problem and acknowledge that voluntary measures are not working,” says Dr. Robert Rangeley, Vice President Atlantic, WWF-Canada. “If NAFO’s Scientific Council starts working on solutions at their June meeting then it will be the responsibility of the Fisheries Commission, in September, to impose strict management measures that will give cod recovery a chance.”

* Bycatch is here defined as unused and unmanaged catch. You can find more information about bycatch in “Defining and Estimating Global Marine Fisheries Bycatch”; a paper co-authored by WWF for the journal Marine Policy. According to this paper, the global bycatch now constitutes over 40 percent of the global reported catch.

This year, fishermen in the southern ocean of Australia report seeing more tuna than in 20 years. They report not only bigger catches, but also that the average tuna is about 20% lager than previous years.

Australian Tuna Association chief executive Brian Jeffries says: “There’s a lot more fish out there than there has been in the past 10 years and the fish are bigger in that period.”

This leads some to believe that the tuna population is recovering and that it has been doing so since 2006 when it was discovered that Japanese boats were catching 40,000 tonnes of southern blue fin tuna illegally each year and had been doing so for at least 20 years. The discovery lead to a crack down on Japanese illegal fishing and the illegal fishing in the region has, although still preset, dramatically dropped since 2006.

Is the tuna population in the Southern Ocean starting to recover, or is this just a sign of an imminent collapse – similar to the good years that preceded the cod collapse in the Atlantic? Only the future can tell.

Scientists from three different European countries – Norway, Belgium and the UK – are now launching a new research project where the aim is to find out if cods can feel pain or not.

“Most people agree that mammals and birds can feel pain, but people are less sure about fish,” says project leader Øyvind Aas-Hansen of NOFIMA, an aquaculture research institute whose headquarters are in Tromsø, Norway.

Fish show many signs of being able to experience pain, but we still know very little about how their brains react to stimuli that would cause mammals and birds to feel pain. According to some scientists, the brain of a fish is not equipped with certain structures needed to process pain, but others believe that fish nevertheless do sense some type of pain.

What we do know is that fish show a long row of behavioural responses that could be interpreted as signs of pain, such as avoidance reactions. Fish are also capable of producing pain-relieving opiates and the fish brain is equipped with receptors for both pain and opiates.

The European researchers hope that modern medical technology, especially functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalograms (EEGs) will make it possible for them to learn more about how the cod brain actually works. The aim of the study is to indentify which parts of the cod brain that becomes activated when a cod is exposed to potentially painful stimuli, and the researchers will also study how these signals are processed.

In order to test the brain of a fish, there is no need to expose it to any type of severe or prolonged pain; a mild stimulus that simply provokes an unpleasant sensation is enough to see how the brain reacts. “We will use the same procedures as those used on healthy human volunteers,” Dr Aas-Hansen explains.

If cods are indeed able to feel pain, Dr Aas-Hansen hopes that the results of the study will be used as yet another argument in favour of keeping aquarium fish in benevolent conditions. The study is however unlikely to affect European legislation since most regulations already assume that fish can feel pain.

Dr Aas-Hansen also points out how comparative research on how the brain works in different animals can give an insight into our own human brain. “This is ground-breaking work,” he says. “No other scientists have previously studied the cod’aquarius brain this way.”

The project will run for three years and is funded by the Norwegian Research Council.