Atlantic cod text from the reference. Atlantic cod The Atlantic cod ("Gadus morhua") is a benthopelagic fish of the family Gadidae, widely consumed by humans. It is also commercially known as cod or codling. Dry cod may be prepared as unsalted stockfish, as cured salt cod or clipfish. In the western Atlantic Ocean, cod has a distribution north of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and around both coasts of Greenland and the Labrador Sea; in the eastern Atlantic, it is found from the Bay of Biscay north to the Arctic Ocean, including the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, Sea of the Hebrides, areas
Cod declines in high "at risk" categories and applied a decision of "vulnerable", a lower-risk category, to the entire species within Canadian waters. COSEWIC not only provided no accounting for the variance of its designation from the Report recommendation, it did not admit that variance. COSEWIC also refused to release the Report, despite that its rules required it to. Bell, the Report author, subsequently stated that political pressure by the DFO within COSEWIC was what accounted for the difference. In 2000, WWF placed cod on the endangered species list. The WWF issued a report stating the global cod catch had suffered