According to the report saithe fishery of the North Sea and the Arctic Ocean has got MSC status. The fishing method use in this fishery is bottom trawl and the number of vessels it has is seven. Saithe is a large fish in the cod family (Gadidae). It is distributed across the North Atlantic in the Barents Sea, around Greenland and Iceland, in the North Sea and as far south as the Bay of Biscay and North Carolina (although rare on the edges of this range).
The fishery is gregarious, and is known to migrate ontogenetically and for spawning. Adult saithe are piscivorous, feeding on smaller fish. In the eastern Atlantic, juvenile saithe are distributed in coastal waters – in the fjords on the coast of Norway, for example. They reach mature age around 3 years, and at the same time migrate offshore where they live as adults roughly between 200 and 400 m depth.
Regarding the fishing method the gear used to fish for saithe is a standard demersal otter trawl. The trawl mesh size must be at least 100mm in EU waters ICES Subarea VI, 110mm in EU waters ICES Subarea IV and 120mm in Norwegian waters. Euronor uses 120mm throughout its fishing area, in both EU and Norwegian waters.
The main commercial market is for fresh and frozen fillets mainly to Spain, France, Eastern Europe and Russia.
