Whitespotted Wedgefish

Globally, wedgefishes are subject to intense fishing pressure on their coastal and shelf habitats that is unregulated across the majority of their distributions. Wedgefishes are captured in industrial, artisanal, and subsistence fisheries with multiple fishing gears, including gillnet, trawl, hook and line, trap, and seine net and are generally retained for their meat and fins (Bonfil and Abdallah 2004, White and Sommerville 2010, Moore 2017, Jabado 2018). There is a high level of fisheries resource use and increasing fishing pressure across the range of the Whitespotted Wedgefish, and demersal coastal fisheries resources have been severely depleted in significant areas of the Indian Ocean.

In general, fishing effort and the number of fishers has increased in recent decades across the range of this species, with demand for shark and ray product increasing over the same period due to the shark fin trade (Chen 1996, Jabado et al. 2017). In the Red Sea for example, the number of traditional boats tripled from 3,100 to 10,000 from 1988 to 2006 (Bruckner et al. 2011), and in Madagascar, the number of pirogues (small-scale fishing boats) rose from ~5,000 in 1983 to ~22,000 in 1996 (Cooke 1997). Most countries have significant fishing fleets operating in coastal waters e.g., Oman (19,000 artisanal boats) and Pakistan (2,000 trawlers) (Jabado et al. 2017).

Sharks and rays, including wedgefishes, are often targeted and now heavily exploited across the region by net and trawl fisheries and increasing fishing effort has put significant pressure on all wedgefish species in the Indo-West Pacific. Furthermore, the high value of fins is driving retention and trade of wedgefishes globally and the targeting of wedgefishes for their fins has also been reported in numerous countries, including Madagascar, Mozambique, and Tanzania (Cripps et al. 2015, Barrowclift et al. 2017, Moore 2017, Jabado 2018). The Whitespotted Wedgefish is landed throughout its range (e.g., Pierce et al. 2008, Humber et al. 2017, Jabado 2018), with the exception of South Africa, and its distribution includes Iran which ranks among the top 20 shark fishing nations globally (Lack and Sant 2011).

Illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing is known to occur in some parts of the range, for example by foreign and regional trawlers in Somalia and Yemen, with wedgefish specifically targeted off East Africa (IOTC 2005, Jabado et al. 2017).

In South Africa, the Whitespotted Wedgefish is caught in prawn trawl fisheries, shark bather protection nets, and recreational fisheries (Dudley and Cliff 1993, Fennessy 1994, Pradervand et al. 2011).

The shallow, inshore soft-bottom habitat preferred by the species is threatened by habitat loss and environmental degradation (Moore et al. 2012, Jabado et al. 2017, Moore 2017). In the Arabian Sea and adjacent waters, dredging and coastal land reclamation has increased in recent years and has resulted in almost total loss of mangroves in some areas, such as Bahrain (Sheppard et al. 2010, Jabado et al. 2017).