Iceland's blue whiting quota for 2011 will drop to 6,500 tonnes from 87,000 tonnes this year, the fisheries and agriculture ministry said.

The decision comes after European coastal states agreed to follow the latest advice from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) and slash their total takes of blue whiting, a fish in the cod family, from 540,000 to just 40,000 tonnes.

"It was suspected, both by officials and fishermen, that the quota for blue whiting would be decreased for 2011," the Icelandic fisheries ministry's top international negotiator Kristjan Freyr Helgason told AFP.

"There has been heavy fishing in this particular stock in previous years, and it was therefore expected that the quota would be reduced," he said, adding "there is always a chance that the quota will be raised again for 2012."

Observers have cautioned that the dramatic drop in blue whiting stocks in recent years might not bode well for the development of mackerel stocks, for which catches have since 2007 "been considerably in excess of ICES advice."

Iceland and the Faroe Islands have been locked in a dispute with the European Union over their decisions to unilaterally hike their mackerel quotas this year.

"It is difficult to predict whether this blue whiting quota change will affect Iceland's mackerel negotiations, but I would think not," Helgason said Wednesday.

earlier related report
Whales offer clues to ice age survival
Washington (UPI) Oct 18, 2010 - The answer to how gray whales survived the last ice age may come from a little-studied population of whales in the northwest Pacific, U.S. researchers say.

Gray whales normally feed on the seafloor at depths of no more than 150 feet and rely heavily on the shallow areas in Alaska's Bering Sea for food, NewScientist.com reports.

But researchers at the Smithsonian Institution say during the last ice age sea levels were 400 feet lower than today and the Bering Sea was a land bridge, leaving little of the north Pacific shallow enough for such feeding.

Northern feeding grounds then might have supported only a few hundred whales, researcher Nick Pyenson said, but genetic studies show no sign of a population reduction during that ice age.

Pyenson says he believes the whales shifted to open-water feeding to survive, an idea supported by the discovery of a small population of non-migrating, open-water feeders living in the northwest Pacific year-round.

So why are there so few open-water feeders now?

The non-migratory, open-water whales would have been easy targets for early whalers, Pyenson said, so the migratory population has come to dominate.

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