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Madagascar started exploring longline fishery in 2007 by shifting from trawl gear to small longliners. The number of vessels, targeting tuna and tuna-like species in the IOTC area of competence, has been increasing. In 2012, Malagasy flag deployed 8 longliners less than 24 m off the east coast (Annexe1). Note that some of them are multigear, wherebery fishing vessels may target demersal resources and at othertimes they may target tuna and tuna-like species. The following results were obtained from the Malagasy observer program database and from pelagic species companies’ declarations. The trend of total declared catches decreased throughout recent years and ranged from 497 tons to 388 tons in 2010 and 2012, respectively. The decline of catches is due to the reduction of number of big vessels. Indeed, a significant declining trend in percentage of shark landings (from 17% to 13%) was observed over the period. This paper figured out that monthly effort ranged from 14,000 hooks deployed in April to 49,447 hooks deployed in October. Total catch was 388,361 tons which was composed of 44.66% tuna, 25.38% billfishes, 13.24% sharks and 16.72% of others species. Sharks landed were composed mainly of mako shark (92.42%) and blue shark (6.84%) and their CPUEs’ were 143.5 Kg/1,000 hooks and 13.6 Kg/1,000 hooks, respectively. Two specimens of shortfin mako ranged from 212 to 258 cm FL were identified by observers on board. In the same way, 37 specimens of Blue shark ranged from 164 cm to 352 cm FL. This study showed some biological information of all observed species such as length, weight, sex, GSI maturity. Observers reported that Malagasy longliners still caught IOTC prohibited species such as bigeye thresher and thresher.
