Escape mortality of cod, saithe, and haddock in a

We investigated the survival of gadoid fish in the Barents Sea escaping from a demersal trawl during commercial fishing conditions, with and without a sorting grid, at high and low levels of fishing intensity. The mortality of cod and saithe was negligible and unrelated to experimental conditions. H...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Barents Sea Trawl Fishery, Aud Vold Soldal, Irene Huse, Mike Breen
Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
Format: Text
Language:English
Published: 2007
Subjects:
cod
Online Access:http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.502.5284
http://icesjms.oxfordjournals.org/content/64/9/1836.full.pdf
Description
Summary:We investigated the survival of gadoid fish in the Barents Sea escaping from a demersal trawl during commercial fishing conditions, with and without a sorting grid, at high and low levels of fishing intensity. The mortality of cod and saithe was negligible and unrelated to experimental conditions. Haddock mortality was generally greater than observed in earlier experiments and inversely related to fish length. Any possible effects of experimental conditions were hidden by large variability in the observed rates of mortality. We conclude that the observed mortality of haddock is confounded by methodological problems, particularly the instability of the observation cages, and does not reflect the true escape mortality. Cod and saithe are capable of surviving the stress of passage through, and escape from, the trawl, whereas haddock are more vulnerable, despite being a closely related species.