his species is not detrimentally affected by expanding deepwater fisheries in the future, particularly in the Eastern Central and Southeast Atlantic.
|Range Description:||Mediterranean Sea: found in the Western Mediterranean (Spain, France, Italy, Albania, Malta, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco). |
Northeast, eastern central and southeast Atlantic: Iceland and Norway south to Senegal, Sierra Leone, Côte d'Ivoire to Nigeria, Cameroon to Gabon, Azores and Cape Verde Islands (Compagno in prep.).
Native:Algeria; Cameroon; Cape Verde; Côte d'Ivoire; France; Gabon; Iceland; Italy; Libya; Malta; Morocco; Nigeria; Norway; Portugal (Azores, Madeira, Portugal (mainland)); Senegal; Sierra Leone; Spain; Tunisia; United Kingdom
|FAO Marine Fishing Areas:|
Atlantic – northeast; Atlantic – southeast; Atlantic – eastern central; Mediterranean and Black Sea
|Range Map:||Click here to open the map viewer and explore range.|
Data collected from 1985–2002 by the Italian national GRUND project (Gruppo Nazionale Risorse Demersali) and from 1994–2002 by the MEDITS project (Mediterranean International Trawl Survey) (Relini 1998, Bertrand et al. 2000) provided information on the abundance and bathymetric distribution of Etmopterus spinax. Analysis of trends in Biomass Index (BI kg per km²) of E. spinax from 1985–2002 indicated stable populations in the northern Tyrrhenian Sea (Relini et al. 2000, Cecchi et al. 2004). Etmopterus spinax was present at both high frequency (19% of the hauls) and high abundance (between 1 and 10 kg per km²) in the Mediterranean, with a standing stock biomass of 4% (2,248 t). The species was found to have an especially high presence in the western-central part of the Mediterranean basin (Morocco, Spain, France, Tyrrhenian, Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily coasts) (Baino et al. 2001). Data collected in the Gulf of Valencia (Spain) during 1988–1989 from a bottom trawl fishery for Red Shrimp Aristeus antennatus revealed the presence of E. spinax in 87.5% of trawls carried out between 450 and 675 m depth, with a mean abundance of 1.04 specimens per hour trawl (Guallart 1990). All sizes were represented in the captures (from juveniles to adults of both sexes) and observations made in later years did not reveal any significant change in the abundance of E. spinax in this area (J. Guallart pers. comm. 2006).
Catch rates in Scottish surveys from 1998–2004 were 81% of those in Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) surveys in the 1970s (T. Blasdale pers. comm. 2006). These surveys cannot be directly compared as they used different gear and vessels and fished different depth ranges, but they do appear to indicate that population levels have declined slightly from pre-fishery levels (Jones et al. 2005).
In southern Portugal Catch Per Unit Effort (CPUE) data for captures with deepwater longlines set from 450–780 m depth are 1.71/1,000 hooks (s.d.= 1.83) (R. Coelho unpubl. data). Deep water trawlers in the Algarve capture this species from 200–700 m depth and CPUEs are highest at 500 m depth with a capture rate of 15.74 specimens per hour (Coelho et al. 2005b). CPUE (kg per hour fished) from French deepwater trawl vessels in ICES Division VIa (West of Scotland) showed discard rates of this species to peak at 18.3 kg/hr at 500 m and then decline to 1.3 kg/hr at 700 m (ICES WD, Crozier 2003).
Eastern Central and Southeast Atlantic
This species was common off the coast of Northwestern Africa in the 1980s and was still very common in more recent surveys (Gulyugin et al. 2006).
|Current Population Trend:||Unknown|
|Habitat and Ecology:||Etmopterus spinax is found on the outer continental shelves and upper slopes at depths of 70–2,000 m, mostly between 200 and 500 m (Compagno in prep.). In the Mediterranean E. spinax has been recorded from 300–2,000 m depth (F. Serena pers. obs. 2007). In the Adriatic Sea it is reported down to 1,200 m depth (Ungaro et al. 2001). In the Thyrrenian Sea, Italy, Cecchi et al. (2004) found the typical depth distribution to be 322–633 m. In the Gulf of Valencia, Spain it is commonly caught by commer