Applications of Statistical Catch‐at‐Age Assessment Methodology to Gulf of Maine cod

The Gulf of Maine cod SCAA assessment presented to the 2008 GARM III meetings is updated to take account of new data. Two Base Cases are put forward: one involving a Ricker form for the stock‐recruitment relationship, and the other treating expected recruitment as effectively independent of spawning biomass. The former provides a better fit to the spawning biomass and recruitment estimates, but is less robust by way of lesser precision and a strong retrospective pattern. Of a variety of sensitivity tests, increasing M from 0.2 to 0.3 to lessen the dome in the estimated selectivity‐at‐age vector leads to an improved likelihood and a resource estimated to be closer to its MSY biomass.