Eastern Baltic cod grow much smaller than they did due to overfishing

My take away from this is that letting the small fish go under the premise that they are juveniles that will later grow to be bigger lets the adult midgets go, ruining the gene pool. I wonder if this finding will have any impact on conservation rules against taking small fish when fishing.

I'm sure I read somewhere that Maori fishermen used to eat small-mid sized fish and left the largest ones because they were the best breeders. I can't find a reference now but has logic.

I don't like how this is worded. Makes it sound as though the cod are actively reducing their size. But this is very straight forward Darwin's Theory, survival of the fittest, in action. In this case, the "fittest" cod are the ones with the propensity to be small, since they can escape the nets and survive to breed and pass on that propensity.

And it follows that there won't be a "bounce back" of the larger cod any time soon, as it takes thousands of years in a minimally interrupted state for such diversity to come about in nature. Of course this applies to all other living creatures as well.

Had to truncate the title to fit 80 char limit

Pertains to Eastern Baltic cod, not all

Related, this is an excellent book on Cod fishing and how it helped humans and finally how overfishing has hurt the Cod numbers: https://www.markkurlansky.com/books/cod-a-biography-of-the-f...

It might sound like a boring topic, but it's one of the best books I've read and something I recommend a lot.

What's impressive is that somebody, somewhere keeps collecting a nice stash of Eastern Baltic cod otoliths in hopes that somebody else would come along and invent a new way to use them.

I've often made the argument that evolution can happen very quickly within a few generations and doesn't necessarily take millions of years. It's interesting to see some cases in nature where rapid changes in a predator's behavior (in this case humans) can radically alter a visible trait.

The traditional approach to this problem is to harvest males and let females go. You're not going to select them out of sexual reproduction.

You will see males evolve to resemble females more closely, though.

Thanks for this cod piece.

Are there any 'old fashioned' cod in captivity or maybe stored DNA samples? Maybe Collosal could splice the missing genes back in and bring them back into the gene pool.

Regression?

Spoiler: because overfishing altered their genes

Modernity/Capitalism supercharges the hate Christianity has for nature, and well take out the earth with ourselves in the process soon.

Hail the great anthropocene.

Reminds me of a line that Philip Glass co-opted for his 5th Symphony:

“Therefore the land mourns, and all who dwell in it languish, and also the beasts of the field and the birds of the heavens, and even the fish of the sea are taken away.”