French Minister Annick Girardin described the images of the "dead fish carcass" as shocking and asked the national fisheries monitoring agency to investigate, according to the Guardian.
Virginijus Sinkevicius - a European Commissioner for the Environment, Ocean and Fisheries - said he was looking for "full information and evidence on the incident".
The ship representative said that the incident occurred early on February 3, the cause was due to a broken fishing net, and emphasized that this incident "rarely happened".
"According to European Union law, this has been recorded in the ship's logbook and reported to the authorities of the country where the ship is flying the flag, Lithuania," the representative of the ship informed and added that the number of dead fish will be deducted from the ship's quota.
Images of the incident, released by the French Sea Shepherd campaign group, show a thick layer of cod covering the ocean's surface. More than 100,000 fish have covered an area of about 3,000 square meters.
