By-catch of rays in the 2002/03 toothfish fishery around
South Georgia

The 2002/2003 fishing season was the first in which three new policies for rays were tried:
• It was the first in which vessels were asked to cut off all rays at water level to assist survival and conservation of rays;
• It was the first in which very good quality information was available from all observers’ tally periods on the catch rates of rays cut off the line;
• In 2003 the UK, with the cooperation of Chile and one fishing company, undertook an experiment to determine the survivorship of cut-off rays. This is described elsewhere by Endicott & Agnew (WG-FSA-03/??).
We estimated the number of rays that were likely to have died as a result of being caught on longlines using a combination of the observer tally information and the survivorship experiments. The estimate, between 34 and 46 t, is an order of magnitude lower than the precautionary TAC for this fishery, 390 t.