Effects of climate change and fishing on cod growth performance

Our Lab team member Raquel Ruiz gave a talk last Friday at IEO-Vigo. She presented the work she carried out during her master thesis in collaboration with Fran Saborido (IIM-CSIC) and Rosario Domínguez (IEO-Vigo). The main goal of this research was to disentangling the effect of climate change and fishing on cod growth performance. To do so, Raquel got immersed in the concept of sclerochronology, learning otolith age reading, using software’s such us IMAGE-J (image processing software) and COFECHA (widely use in dendrochronology), which allows to validate the dating accuracy. She also learnt to develop mixed-effects models. As main conclusions, she found that cod growth is influenced by food availability (Pandalus borealis), proportion of matures in the population, fishing and recruitment.

It was an interesting talk with a lot of discussion about the impact of fishing on stock productivity and the possibility of including these techniques on stock assessment models to improve management of fish stock.