Elasmobranch Landings Malvan, India 2018-20

This data was collected by Ms. Trisha Gupta from Malvan, central west coast of India in the state of Maharashtra. It forms the basis for analysis of catch composition in Malvan for the study titled 'Insights from catch composition and historical records of elasmobranchs in the Malvan fishery on the central west coast of India' which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Fish Biology, 2023. DOI and link https://doi.org/10.1111/jfb.15416 - please do cite this paper and the Figshare DOI if this data is used for other studies or research work. This would be highly appreciated.Landing surveys were conducted over three sampling periods: February to May 2018, October 2018 to May 2019 and from December 2019 to March 2020. For the first two periods, sampling was conducted thrice a week on alternate days, while for the last period sampling was once a week on a randomly selected day. January–May constituted the pre-monsoon season and August–December constituted the post-monsoon season. Both morning and evening auctions were surveyed and all boats with elasmobranchs were sampled.Since on any given day only a fraction of the boats (50% on average) would land their catch for auction and due to the smaller scale of fisheries in Malvan, as compared to other bigger ports in India, all boats that landed elasmobranchs could be sampled. About 10% (by abundance) of each elasmobranch taxon was further sampled for biological data such as sex, maturity stage and size (total length TL for sharks and guitarfish, disc width DW for rays). Further through informal interviews data on fishery factors such as gear, depth, effort, time etc. were collected.