Global assessment of manta and devil ray gill plate and meat trade: conservation implications and opportunities
Palacios, Marta D., Weiand, Laura, Laglbauer, Betty J.L., Cronin, Melissa R., Fowler, Sarah, Jabado, Rima W., Ko Gyi, Thanda, Fernando, Daniel, De Bruyne, Godefroy, Shea, Stanley K.H., Hilton, Paul, Gao, Yi Li, and Stevens, Guy M.W. (2025) Global assessment of manta and devil ray gill plate and meat trade: conservation implications and opportunities. Environmental Biology of Fishes, 108 (4). pp. 611-638.
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Abstract
Due to overexploitation in fisheries partly driven by international trade demand, mobulid rays are among the most threatened of elasmobranch families. We conducted a global assessment of the state of manta and devil ray trade employing expert elicitation through country-focused online surveys (n = 109) and interviews (n = 21), along with analysis of the FAO Total Production and CITES Trade Databases, and online trade and physical store surveys in China and Hong Kong SAR. Findings across 75 countries reveal significant mobulid landings in 43 countries. Globally, mobulid meat is consumed locally in at least 35 countries and exported from ten, with five major destination countries. Gill plates are extracted in 14 countries and exported from at least 14 across Asia and Africa, with five major destination countries in Asia. Meat and gill plate prices ranged between 0.24 – 10 and 4.8 – 1260 USD/kg respectively, depending on country and product form. Physical retailers of gill plates declined in Guangzhou and Hong Kong SAR in the past decade, while online retailers increased, but overall, the total number of retailers rose from 41 to 135 between 2011 and 2023. By linking country-specific mobulid management data to their roles in the meat and gill plate trade, price ranges, consumption patterns, and landing data, we ranked 75 countries from highest to lowest impact upon mobulid populations, identifying 14 as high-priority. Findings highlight the need for improved capacity-building in fisheries management and stronger enforcement aimed collectively at reversing the current unsustainable consumption and trade of mobulids.
| Item ID: | 88202 |
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| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 1573-5133 |
| Keywords: | CITES, Fisheries, Mobula, Mobulid, Policy |
| Copyright Information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Interna- tional License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. |
| Date Deposited: | 26 Mar 2026 02:53 |
| FoR Codes: | 31 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 3103 Ecology > 310305 Marine and estuarine ecology (incl. marine ichthyology) @ 50% 30 AGRICULTURAL, VETERINARY AND FOOD SCIENCES > 3005 Fisheries sciences > 300505 Fisheries management @ 50% |
| SEO Codes: | 18 ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT > 1805 Marine systems and management > 180502 Assessment and management of pelagic marine ecosystems @ 100% |
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