October 17, 2019 — The population of cod in the Northern Bering Sea has increased immensely since 2010, and scientists are using fish DNA to find out why.
Think of it like a genetic ancestry test, but for fish.
Until recently, pacific cod were rarely found in the Northern Bering Sea. A 2010 survey showed cod made up only three percent of the entire fish population. That’s been changing, fast.
A survey in the summer of 2017 showed that number shot up 900 percent.
Ingrid Spies is a research fisheries biologist who led the way on this research to determine whether the population spike is evidence of a growing population or of an existing population migrating from elsewhere?
One thought was that cod could have migrated from Russia or the Gulf of Alaska, where they observed cod numbers decline significantly in 2017. Scientists were able to come to a conclusive answer to the question using genetic testing.