22 Facts About Atlantic cod

Atlantic cod is a benthopelagic fish of the family Gadidae, widely consumed by humans.

Atlantic cod was fished for a thousand years by north European fishers who followed it across the North Atlantic Ocean to North America.

Several Atlantic cod stocks collapsed in the 1990s and have failed to fully recover even with the cessation of fishing.

The Atlantic cod is labelled vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, per a 1996 assessment that the IUCN notes needs updating.

Atlantic cod is one of three cod species in the genus Gadus along with Pacific cod and Greenland cod.

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Atlantic cod are a shoaling species and move in large, size-structured aggregations.

One study of a migrating Atlantic cod shoal showed significant variability in feeding habits based on size and position in the shoal.

Atlantic cod are apex predators in the Baltic and adults are generally free from the concerns of predation.

Juvenile Atlantic cod make substrate decisions based on risk of predation.

Additionally, juvenile Atlantic cod vary their behaviour according to the foraging behaviour of predators.

Ultimately, food selection by Atlantic cod is affected by the food item size relative to their own size.

However, providing for size, Atlantic cod do exhibit food preference and are not simply driven by availability.

Atlantic cod act as intermediate, paratenic, or definitive hosts to a large number of parasite species: 107 taxa listed by Hemmingsen and MacKenzie and seven new records by Perdiguero-Alonso et al.

The predominant groups of cod parasites in the northeast Atlantic were trematodes and nematodes, including larval anisakids, which comprised 58.

Parasites of Atlantic cod include copepods, digeneans, monogeneans, acanthocephalans, cestodes, nematodes, myxozoans, and protozoans.

Atlantic cod has been targeted by humans for food for thousands of years, and with the advent of modern fishing technology in the 1950s there was a rapid rise in landings.

The quantity of Atlantic cod landed from fisheries has been recorded by many countries from around the 1950s and attempts have been made to reconstruct historical catches going back hundreds of years.

Northwest Atlantic cod has been regarded as heavily overfished throughout its range, resulting in a crash in the fishery in the United States and Canada during the early 1990s.

Technologies that contributed to the collapse of Atlantic cod include engine-powered vessels and frozen food compartments aboard ships.

Atlantic cod was a top-tier predator, along with haddock, flounder and hake, feeding upon smaller prey, such as herring, capelin, shrimp, and snow crab.

North Sea Atlantic cod stock is primarily fished by European Union member states, the United Kingdom and Norway.

Eastern Baltic Atlantic cod is genetically distinct and adapted to the brackish environment.