Epsilon Open Archive

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 the fishing daytime while in Q1 only, a MIK trawl is used at night for sampling fish larvae.

In all, 45 valid hauls were towed using the GOV-trawl, three hauls in the North Sea, 24 in the Skagerrak and 18 in the Kattegat. The Swedish Armed Forces disallowed us three of our planned hauls resulting in lower coverage in the Skagerrak.

The total catch amounted to 13,1 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 5 554 otoliths were collected from 11 different species.

MIK trawling resulted in 60 valid trawl hauls with catches of 607 herring larvae, 2 sprat larvae and 12 eel larvae and several other species.