Atlantic cod (Eastern Baltic cod population)

During (size) selective overharvesting of wild populations, marked phenotypic changes have been documented, while the evolutionary genomic basis is often unresolved. Time-series collections combined with genomic tools present unique opportunities to study how evolutionary changes are manifested at the genome-wide level. Here, we take advantage of a unique temporal dataset from the overexploited Eastern Baltic cod (Gadus morhua) population that exhibited a 48% decrease in asymptotic body length over the last 25 years. A total of 152 individuals caught in Bornholm Basin (collected on RV ALKOR, Baltic Sea Integrative Long-Term Data Series) were sequenced with short-reads (2x100bp or 2x150bp paired end library) on Illumina platforms. The samples were selected to cover a full breadth of the available time period and phenotypic spectrum by 1) random sampling for each time points (115 individuals from 1996, 2002, 2008, 2014, and 2019) then 2) adding samples from two tails of the length distribution for year 1996-1998 (37 individuals).