If this blog is supposed to provide a highlight reel of all the important things I do on the boats and the interesting things I see, then I have woefully neglected a large part of my job. These fish are what it's all about - Melanogrammus aeglefinus, commonly known as haddock. The boats that I observe on are bottom trawlers, which means they drag a large net along the bottom of the ocean to scoop up the fish that like to hang out down there. They're directing for (hoping to catch) what they call groundfish, what I might call benthic fish, which just means that they live near the bottom of their environments and don't swim around in the water column very much. There are a lot of different species that qualify as groundfish, and what the fishermen are and aren't allowed to keep depends on the license they have. Part of my work before fishing begins is to review the conditions of their license, so I can advise the captain should they be tossing or keeping something they shouldn't be, but I digress. The perfect catch is 100% haddock that are 38cm or larger. Fish that are 37cm or below are considered small fish, and for the whole trip the catch is only allowed to be 15% small at maximum. This is a large part of the work I do - finding out how much of the catch is small. To do this, I sample approximately 200 fish twice per day and measure their length, determine the %small from that, and then average and extrapolate for the whole trip. The idea here is that a lot of fish that small haven't lived long enough to reproduce yet, so if we catch them all then in a few years, the haddock stock will crash, which would be bad news for everyone, but especially the ecosystems we fish in. We saw this in the cod stock crash in the nineties, which the population has still not recovered from. (By stock, I mean fish population, not price.) If the boats are catching too many small fish, then the Department of Fisheries and Oceans will close a certain area or sometimes entire fisheries. This is likely the most important information that we provide to them. So, like I said, in a perfect world, every tow would be 5000lbs of haddock and nothing else. It's almost always a haddock majority by a large margin, but I have also seen a pollock majority once. Most catches are a mix of haddock, pollock and cod. Haddock is the most sought after and most valuable in price per pound, so it is the most desirable. There are strict quotas on cod catch, so great measures are taken to try to prevent cod from coming up in the net. Once you're out of cod quota, you're out of luck, and ground fishing for you is done for the season. The picture above showing a single fish is the largest haddock I have yet to see, at 66cm long. They're usually in the 40s, but get up to early 50s pretty routinely too. I have seen less than a dozen that are bigger than that, and on a typical trip I will measure more than a thousand of these fish. The other picture, that looks like the fish printer is running out of ink, shows the wide variation of colours in haddock. Their back sides can be so dark they're almost black to shades of purple to light grey. Their bellies are usually white to grey. That haddock at the top is the lightest one that I've yet to see, which prompted me to take the picture. Haddock are easily identifiable by that dark line that runs the length of them, called the lateral line. Pollock are dark with white lines, and cod are green with light lines and leopard spots. Another distinct feature of the haddock are their spot just behind their pelvic fin, sometimes called the Devil's thumbprint, though I'm not sure what earned it that name. Some have other dark patches on them, while others are very uniform in coloration. I also hear they're pretty tasty.