The most important fish species seen from an ecological point of view, is the polar cod. It is a key species in the marine food web, serving as a primary food resource for seabirds and marine mammals. Polar cod will be very susceptible to oil spills in ice covered waters and potentially also to release of untreated production water. Information on abundance, location of spawning areas, and vulnerability of egg, larvae and adult fish to oil components in the water will be highly relevant as background information in NEBAs and when EIAs of exploration drilling and establishment of production facilities shall be prepared.
The fish fauna of the waters off NE Greenland is poorly known in all aspects – diversity, abundance, range of species, ecology etc. There are no commercially exploited stocks in the assessment area, except for Greenland halibut in the waters close to Iceland. However, this may change with increasing water temperatures, thus a better baseline on the fish fauna is needed.
It is proposed to conduct a study with focus on the ecological most important species: the Polar cod. The project will identify the species composition, abundance and distribution of the fish fauna in the assessment area in the Greenland Sea, in order to identify the areas that are most vulnerable to oil spill. The project will combine bottom trawl hauls and sampling of environmental DNA ( eDNA) primarily from fish. The eDNA content of the samples will be compared to the fish species in the trawl catches, and checked for a quantitative correlation between the weight of fish, of a given fish species, and the amount of eDNA.