Survivability of discarded skates in bottom trawlers: implications to the discard ban

A detailed study on skate and ray discards survivability based on sampling trials by observers on board commercial vessels and onshore survival experiments has been carried out by IEO. Our objective was to obtain the composition of species, size and sex of the species caught in fisheries in the Cantabrian‐Northwest fishing ground using the information provided by observers onboard commercial vessels and to analyze the percentage of mixture of species retained on board or discarded and also to obtain survival estimates from dedicated experiments.