CODSPA | NMBU

The project will evaluate how stress from fishing activites is affecting cod reproduction during the spawning season.

Timeframe

01 Jan 2025 - 01 Jan 2028

Funding

Nordforsk

Faculty

The Faculty of Veterinary Medicine

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About the project

Background
Spawning cod aggregations have been historically targeted by commercial fisheries since they tend to be predictable in time and space and offer easy access to large number of individuals. It has, however, been considered in recent years if it may be necessary to impose time area closures during the peak of the cod spawning season to ensure reproductive success of the species. Even though there are country-specific differences on how they manage cod stocks, several countries have opted to include time are closures as part of their management schemes, such as Iceland, The Faroe Islands, and the United Kingdom. However, it has been proven to be challenging to assess the effectivity of this fisheries management tool since the effects are multifaceted.
In the CODSPA project we propose to assess the effect of fishing activities on stress levels in spawning cod from locations across Norway, Iceland, and The Faroe Islands. This novel approach will allow us to quantify the behavioral and physiological response to fishing stress on spawning cod individuals and how this may be affecting their reproductive success in terms of gamete quality, viability, and fertilization capacity. Furthermore, we will also assess how fishing stress experienced by the parents will affect hatching success, survival success, growth, deformities, and the behavioral and physiological stress profile of the next generation, which will help establish the possible benefits of imposing a no fishing time area closure for spawning cod.
The CODSPA project will also incorporate state of the art genetic techniques that will help develop marker tools for the assessment of cod spawning activities without the need for fish surveys. Furthermore, we also plan to obtain and quantify wild cod spawning behavior, a task that has not been done before. The novelty of the approach and techniques proposed in this project will certainly provide a more quantifiable measure of the feasibility and efficacy of time area closures. We expect that the results obtained in this project will thus provide crucial information for the assessment of time area closure as a fisheries management tool.
Aim
The main aim of the project is to:
Evaluate how stress from fishing activities is affecting cod reproduction during the spawning season.
To achieve this, three key objectives are defined:
Objective 1: Investigate the behavioral and stress response in individuals and groups.
Objective 2: Quantify the effect of stress on sperm, egg quality/viability, fertilization rate and embryonic development.
Objective 3: Elucidate how paternal and maternal stress affects survival success and the stress reactivity profile of the next generation.
Objective 4: Asses how water temperatures may be affecting the peak of spawning activities and how this may affect time-area closure management.
Participants
NMBU:
Faroe Marine Research Institute:
Petur Steingrund
Senior researcher, Fisheries Biology department
Sólvá Eliasen
Research assistant, Fisheries Biology department
Tóra Winther Reinert
Research assistant, Fisheries Biology department
Poul J. Vestergaard
Research assistant, Fisheries Biology department
The University of Oslo:
Quentin Mauvisseau
Researcher, Natural History Museum

University of Iceland:
Guðbjörg Ásta Ólafsdóttir
Research director, Research Centre of the Westfjords
Michelle Valliant
Postdoc, Research Centre of the Westfjords
Ragnar Edvardsson
Research assistant, Research Centre of the Westfjords
Ervik Marin Research AS:
Renate Rimstad Bøe
- Researcher
Julie Trollebø Kvalheim
- Researcher
Hogne Bleie
- Manager
Strytan Dive Center (Iceland):
Erlendur Bogason
-Commercial and research diver/underwater videographer