Open access publications in the SLU publication database

The Institute of Marine Research is responsible for the trawl survey in the Skagerrak, a marginal sea to the North Sea and the Kattegat, a transition area to the Baltic 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 47 valid hauls were towed in the whole area using the GOV-trawl, two hauls in the North Sea, 26 in the Skagerrak and 19 in the Kattegat. This year, the Swedish Armed Forces' revoked the previous year's disallowance and we subsequently fished three hauls we hadn't fished since 2014. During the whole survey the weather remained favourable. The total catch amounted to a good 12 tonnes and included 70 species of fish. The biological sampling, which includes collection of otoliths for age analysis, was done on the most important commercial species. In total 5223 otoliths were collected from 11 different species. MIK trawling resulted in 66 valid trawl hauls with catches of 271 herring larvae, 4 sprat larvae and 10 eel larvae and several other species.