User menu
The document provides an overview of the consolidated knowledge about fisheries catching striped marlin (Kajikia audax) in the Indian Ocean since the early 1950s based on a range of data sets collected by Contracting Parties and Cooperating Non-Contracting Parties (CPCs) of the IOTC and curated by the IOTC Secretariat. The available fisheries statistics indicate that striped marlins have been essentially caught in industrial deep-freezing longline fisheries until the 2000s, with some large interannual variability in the catches reported to the Secretariat. While longline catches of striped marlin have shown a major decline since the mid-1990s, becoming very small (~300 t) in recent years, catches of striped marlin from the coastal gillnet fisheries of I.R. Iran and Pakistan have steadily increased to exceed 1,500 t and contribute to more than 60% of the total catches of striped marlin in 2020. Information available on discarding practices of striped marlin in industrial fisheries indicates that discard levels are small in both longline and purse seine fisheries, and all individuals discarded at sea were assessed to be dead. Discarding in coastal fisheries interacting with the species is poorly known but considered to be negligible. Most information available on the spatial distribution of catch and effort comes from large-scale longline fisheries while almost no information is available on the fishing grounds of the coastal gillnet and longline fisheries catching striped marlin. Consequently, the quality of the geo-referenced catch data reported to the Secretariat has substantially decreased over the last three decades. Very little information is available on the size composition of the catch of striped marlin in the Indian Ocean, except for large-scale longline fisheries.
