ICES conducts assessments of whiting in the West of Scotlnad. Since 2015, there should be no directed fisheries and all catches should be minimized. Tagging experiments on recruiting fish indicate that whiting in west of Scotland is a discrete population, three juvenile nursery areas have been discriminated off the west of Scotland and contribute individuals to the spawning aggregations in the Scottish coastal North Sea. As well, there is little indication of interaction between population components in the south and that off the northwest coast of Scotland (ICES 2017).