Atlantic cod: The fish that grows from a millimetre to over a meter becoming a vital fish for many cultures

I created the top photo by placing all the different names used for cod into a cod shape. I love how this art shows how important cod is for many cultures and how cultures differentiated types of cod by name before scientists understood the divergence between cod populations. I took the bottom photo of cod swimming around the “Cod Pond” at Flødevigen Research Center. Photos of cod are hard to come across because they live at the bottom of the ocean and rarely come to the surface, even in the “Cod Pond”. This is a unique population because it is the first population of cod to be grown until maturity in lab conditions. You can see a big belly on the second individual from the top, showing this individual is a female ready to spawn! I used the spawned eggs from these cod to understand how cod eggs survive environmental stress to help inform the protection of future cod populations. On the right, there are photos of different stages of cod eggs under the microscope. Cod eggs are only a couple millimetres in length, it always surprises me that something so small can become such a large and important fish.