Epsilon Open Archive

The Institute of Marine Research is responsible for the trawl survey in the Skagerrak and the Kattegat areas of the North Sea. This survey is conducted twice annually, in quarters 1 and 3. The French bottom trawl GOV is used for sampling demersal species while in Q1 only, a MIK trawl is used at night for sampling fish larvae.During this survey a total of 46 valid hauls were towed in the whole area using the GOV-trawl, 27 in the Skagerrak and 19 in the Kattegat. Also this year, three stations had to be cancelled due to the Swedish Armed Forces' disallowance thereby putting an end to a long and valuable time series. The total catch amounted to 18 tonnes and included 57 species of fish. The biological sampling, which includes collection of otoliths for age analysis, was done on the most important commercial species. In total 4943 otoliths were collected from 11 different species. MIK trawling resulted in 62 valid trawl hauls with catches of 61 herring larvae, 4 sprat larvae and 6 eel larvae and several other species.