A millennium of north-east Atlantic cod juvenile growth trajectories inferred from archaeological otoliths

Archaeological excavations of historical fishing sites across the North Atlantic have recovered high quantities of Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) bones. In the current study we use Atlantic cod otoliths from archaeological excavations of a historical fishing sites in north-west Iceland, dated to AD 970 –AD 1910 to examine historical growth trajectories of cod. No large scale growth variations or shifts in growth patterns were observed in the current chronologies, supporting the stability of historical Atlantic cod growth trajectories. The most significant variation in growth patterns was consistent with those that have been observed in recent times, for example, reduced early juvenile growth during periods of colder ocean temperature. The current results represent a high resolution chronological record of north-east Atlantic cod growth, greatly increasing the prior temporal range of such data, thereby providing a valuable baseline for a broad range of studies on Atlantic cod growth.

• Publication year

  2017

• Venue

  PLoS ONE

• Publication date

  2017-10-27

• Fields of study

  Geography, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0187134PMID 29077736PMCID 5659679
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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