It is, 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.
