[HN Gopher] Cod Have Been Shrinking for Decades, Scientists Say ...
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Cod Have Been Shrinking for Decades, Scientists Say They've Solved
Mystery
Author : littlexsparkee
Score : 51 points
Date : 2025-07-05 19:00 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| littlexsparkee wrote:
| Had to truncate the title to fit 80 char limit
|
| Pertains to Eastern Baltic cod, not all
| mhb wrote:
| Eastern Baltic Cod Shrinking for Decades; Scientists Have
| Answer
| Aardwolf wrote:
| Scientists Find why Eastern Baltic Cod Shrank for Decades
|
| Or, still fitting:
|
| Scientists Find Eastern Baltic Cod Shrank due to Overfishing
| Affecting Genepool
| chasil wrote:
| Eastern Baltic Cod Shrank due to artificial selection
| cratermoon wrote:
| Spoiler: because overfishing altered their genes
| delfinom wrote:
| Overfishing didn't alter their genes. It altered the genepool.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| To be fair, that _is_ the subtitle, "Eastern Baltic cod grow
| to much smaller sizes than they did just 30 years ago,
| because overfishing altered their genes, according to new
| research"
| mscavnicky wrote:
| Regression?
| macinjosh wrote:
| Are there any 'old fashioned' cod in captivity or maybe stored
| DNA samples? Maybe Collosal could splice the missing genes back
| in and bring them back into the gene pool.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| If there is a survival advantage to larger cod (presumably
| there is, or they would not have developed) and if fishing is
| tightly regulated, they should return eventually.
| gcanyon wrote:
| Not necessarily -- the "large" genes could literally have
| been extracted from the gene pool.
|
| It's possible for them to mutate back into existence, but
| that'sa lower-probability, _much_ longer proposition than if
| the genes are still available and just selected against.
| ryao wrote:
| My take away from this is that letting the small fish go under
| the premise that they are juveniles that will later grow to be
| bigger lets the adult midgets go, ruining the gene pool. I wonder
| if this finding will have any impact on conservation rules
| against taking small fish when fishing.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > ruining the gene pool
|
| In what sense? Is being bigger Platonically better than being
| smaller?
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| It's better if you want to eat them lol
| bluGill wrote:
| Small fish generally taste better in my experience. Small
| of course implies younger, so we let the biger ones go as
| well as small ones - there is a too small to eat point.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The traditional approach to this problem is to harvest males and
| let females go. You're not going to select them out of sexual
| reproduction.
|
| You will see males evolve to resemble females more closely,
| though.
| gouthamve wrote:
| Related, this is an excellent book on Cod fishing and how it
| helped humans and finally how overfishing has hurt the Cod
| numbers: https://www.markkurlansky.com/books/cod-a-biography-of-
| the-f...
|
| It might sound like a boring topic, but it's one of the best
| books I've read and something I recommend a lot.
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