bottlenose skate
rostroraja alba latin

In the 17th century, the bottlenose skate was prized by the French for food.

Because of its large size and slow reproductive rate, the bottlenose skate is extremely vulnerable to exploitation by fisheries.

In the Mediterranean, bottlenose skates of most size classes down to egg cases are taken as by-catch in multi-species trawling fisheries.

In 2010, Greenpeace International added the barndoor skate, bottlenose skate, spotback skate, and maltese skate to its seafood red list.

The bottlenose skate is a benthic predator of bony fishes, other elasmobranchs, fish offal, crabs, shrimps, mysids, octopus, and cuttlefish.

The bottlenose skate, spearnose skate, or white skate, Rostroraja alba, is a species of skate in the family Rajidae, and the sole member of its genus.

The bottlenose skate is found along the coastlines of the eastern Atlantic Ocean, from the southern British Isles to South Africa, including the Mediterranean, and extending into the southwestern Indian Ocean to Mozambique.

In the north Atlantic, populations of bottlenose skates have declined severely or disappeared from the Bay of Biscay and the Irish Sea; there are no longer targeted fisheries in these regions due to localized population collapses in the 1960s.

The MEDITS trawl surveys, begun in 1985 and carried out six times a year in four geographic regions, indicates that the bottlenose skate is now very rare in the Mediterranean and that it has been reduced to a small fraction of its former range.