The Common cockle ranges from Scandinavia to Senegal and into the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. Stock structure for the Common Cockle is not well understood. There appears to be four main nodes in the Northeast Atlantic; Demark and the Baltic to the coast of Norway, Ireland Irish sea and western UK, eastern UK to France, Spain, and Portugal (Beaumont and Pether 1996)(Coscia et al. 2013). Given their rather long larval stage of 3-4 weeks (Beaumont and Pether 1996)(Coscia et al. 2013), there is likely some mixing between these nodes and among locations within nodes, making defining a unit stock difficult. As such this profile is for the Common cockle located in the Thames River Estuary in the UK.