"When mackerel started showing up in Iceland, it started a decade-long fight over how to divide the ocean’s riches."
"The Northeast Atlantic mackerel is a small fish with grey or greenish-blue scales and tigerlike black stripes from mouth to tail. Lacking a swim bladder—the gas-filled organ that helps most fish move up and down in the water—the mackerel would sink and die if it ever stopped. So it is always on the move, looking for plankton, crustaceans, and other small fish. It travels in shoals that can be more than 100 feet deep and 600 feet wide, and sometimes, when this great nomadic army catches a glimmer of light, it can resemble an underwater version of the northern lights.
In recent years, the mackerel’s unceasing motion and radically increased abundance have taken it farther north, to Greenland or Svalbard, which lies between Norway and the North Pole, and northwest, to Icelandic waters. And when the fish turned up, the Icelanders took advantage. By tradition, their nation had no claim to this fish, but starting in the mid-2000s, when the lucrative fish arrived in great numbers, they struck.
These fish are not like oil or diamonds or most other natural resources. They move. Most mackerel will start their life in the warmer spring months in Irish and British waters, but they migrate through seas belonging to the European Union, Norway, the Faroe Islands, recently Iceland, and sometimes Greenland, before returning south and east to spawn again. Throughout the annual migration cycle, they grow. A mackerel caught in Norwegian waters is bigger, fatter, and more valuable than those caught in the waters of the Faroe Islands or Iceland. And when the species moved farther north, it set in motion an international conflict about who gets to fish it."
Regin Winther Poulsen reports for the Atlantic February 2021.
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