Since October 2014, the Rostock Thünen Institute for Baltic Sea Fisheries (Thünen-OF) has been regularly tagging live cod and flatfish and releasing them back into their element. The tagged fish are currently released mainly in two regions: 1) Fehmarn, and 2) northeast coast of Rügen. Then we hope that fishermen and anglers will recapture these tagged fish and hand them over to our institute. In this way, we want to find out how old they are for a given length, how fast they grow, and how they are distributed.

Simple tagging experiments on cod and flatfish have been carried out before, but often date back decades.

The connection between migrations, exact age and growth has never been studied in cod and flatfish before. And the scientists of that time unfortunately did not have the analytical possibilities at their disposal that we have today.