Hannah Barnes

speaker

509 appearances 22 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2011 last heard Oct 2013

Hannah Barnes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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More or Less · Plenty more fish in the sea? · 1 Oct 2012 podcast

But, to quote CFAS, the journalists misunderstood the data. matched

For some reason, they decided to class an adult cod as over 13... matched

But that's not million-adult cod. matched

It's an ancient cod. matched

Now, we shouldn't be surprised that there are very few cod over 13, just as we aren't surprised there are hardly any humans older than 100. matched

Here's Dr Karl O'Brien from CFAS. matched

So where did the newspaper get the idea that CODs reach adulthood at 13? matched

Well, in the same article, the Sunday Times states that COD can live to 25, which implies a 13-year-old COD is merely middle-aged, looking forward to paying off its mortgage and getting its kids off to university. matched

Dr Tom Webb thinks the journalist got that 25 figure from a website called Fishbase. matched

He says that although Fishbase is a pretty reliable source of fish-related information, the idea that cod in the North Sea lived to 25 is, well, a bit of a red herring. matched

So here's a question. matched

Given what we now know about when cod mature, just how many adult cod, as the Sunday Times had put it, are there in the North Sea? matched

Remember, they said there are just 100. matched

The right answer? matched

Well, using the same data set the Sunday Times used, it's actually... matched

21 million. matched

Well, here's a more accurate version of that headline, based again on the same data. matched

This could be a more or less record, the most wrong number we have ever reported. matched

But all this raises a more general question. matched

How difficult is it to measure fish stocks across the world and how reliable is the official data? matched

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