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Billfish is a group of marine fishes belonging to families Istiophoridae and Xiphidae mainly found in the offshore waters. These large sized fishes support substantially large and important commercial and recreational fisheries in many parts of the world. In Pakistan, there is no aimed fishery for billfishes and these are landed as components of the catch of pelagic gillnet fisheries. There are other gillnet fisheries in Pakistan which are mainly based in coastal areas. Some of these are species specific like monofilament gillnet fishery for Indian mackerel and bottom set gillnet fisheries for stingrays etc.
Historically billfishes used to be exported to Sri Lanka in salted-dried form fetching higher prices than all other salted products. However, from the last decade, almost entire catches of billfish are traded in chilled form with Iran.
Billfishes are not well studied in Pakistan.With the exception of Osmanyet al. (2009) and Rashid (1966) no work on the billfish was dedicatedly carried out. Rashid (1966) described species of family Istiophoridae from Pakistan whereas Osmanyet al. (2009) described abundance and distribution of billfishes from Pakistan. In addition, Moazzam and Usmani (2004) has published a map showing distribution of billfishes in the Arabian Sea along the coast of Pakistan. Present paper describes details of the billfish fisheries of Pakistan including fishing methods (boats and gears), fishing operations, species composition, commercial landings, disposition and marketing. The landing data presented in this paper obtained from Anonymous (2013) and pertains to two maritime provinces of Pakistan i.e. Sindh and Balochistan as well as some information from Exclusive Economic Zone of Pakistan.
