Animal · Norway, Iceland, Russia
Atlantic cod
Gadus morhua — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The Atlantic cod is a large, heavy fish of the cold northern seas, easy to recognise by the single whisker hanging from its chin. For hundreds of years it has been one of the most important food fishes in the world, and that is exactly why it became scarce.
Picture credit: Wilhelm Thomas Fiege (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Hans Hillewaert (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Hans-Petter Fjeld (CC BY-SA 2.5) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the Atlantic cod live?
Home: Cold shelf seas of the North Atlantic, from Norway to Canada.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Norway, Iceland, Russia, Canada, Greenland, the United Kingdom, the United States.
Conservation status from the IUCN: vulnerable.
The short profile
Fully grown: usually 60 to 120 cm long. It weighs about 10 kilograms. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
Cod live close to the sea floor and hunt herring, sand eels, crabs and shrimp, swallowing them whole. A female can release several million eggs in one spring, yet only a handful of them ever grow up. Cod grow slowly, can live for more than twenty years and reach well over a metre. For centuries whole towns in Norway, Iceland and Newfoundland lived from drying and salting them. Then the fishing boats became too good at their job, and in 1992 the huge cod stock off Newfoundland collapsed so badly that Canada had to close the fishery. Some stocks, such as the one in the Barents Sea, are healthy again, while others have still not recovered.
Find it on the globe
Atlantic cod is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Why did the Atlantic cod almost disappear?
Modern trawlers caught cod faster than the fish could grow up and lay eggs. Off Newfoundland the stock collapsed in 1992 and the fishery was closed, and in many areas the cod have still not come back.
What does an Atlantic cod eat?
Cod eat smaller fish such as herring and sand eels, along with crabs, shrimp and worms from the sea floor. They swallow their food whole, because their many small teeth cannot chew.
How big does an Atlantic cod get?
Most cod caught today are between 60 and 120 cm long and weigh a few kilograms. Very old ones can pass one and a half metres and weigh more than 40 kg, but such giants have become rare.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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