Cod is one of the EU's most economically important fish species, yet lack of traceability leads to problems with stock management and consumer confidence. This project is developing legally defensible methods to establish the location of spawning and of

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Cod is one of the EU's most economically
important fish species, yet lack of traceability
leads to problems with stock management and
consumer confidence. This project is developing
legally defensible methods to establish the
location of spawning and of harvest of individual
cod. Objectives will be achieved through the use
of multiple tracing techniques followed by
multivariate statistics.

To establish a traceability method, wild and
farmed cod were sampled in 2002 and 2003 from the
Atlantic (Irish Shelf), the Baltic Sea, Iceland
waters, the Irish Sea, the North Sea, and from
fish farms in Iceland and Scotland.

For The Future Supporting Consumer Confidence in
aquaculture and capture fisheries We plan to
develop a Marie Curie Research and Training
Network under the EU Framework 6 programme to
continue to study traceability. Activities within
this future network will include methods of
inducing traceability to promote consumer
confidence, for example by bar-coding otoliths by
using fluctuating temperature to mark the
products of individual hatcheries or farms.
Each fish is analysed by a combination of
techniques, including body morphometery, otolith
morphometery, otolith chemistry, genetic analysis
of fish tissue (allozyme, mtDNA, Syp I and
microsatellite), fish parasite and bacterial
assemblages, and molecular markers for specific
fish bacteria.
A.J. Geffen Audrey.Geffen_at_ifm.uib.no
Department of Fisheries and Marine
BiologyUniversity of BergenPostbox 7800, 5020
Bergen NORWAY Tel [phone], Fax (47)
55 58 44 50