Working Group on Crangon Fisheries and Life History (WGCRAN; outputs from 2024 meeting)

The Working Group on Crangon Fisheries and Life History (WGCRAN) investigates the population dynamics of the brown shrimp Crangon crangon and the factors that influence both the stock and the individual. A central aim of the group is to create a biological basis for recommendations and to identify ways of achieving sustainable management.

The report provides the annual international update on the landing statistics of brown shrimp for 2023, which shows the second lowest amount of brown shrimp landed in the history of the time-series, only surpassed by the year 1990.

The greatest decline in landings was found in the Dutch and Belgian fishery but also the German fishers experienced a decrease in the landings. The fishing effort was similar to previous years, resulting in a low LPUE for most countries with the exception of Denmark and United Kingdom. For the Netherlands, it was the lowest LPUE value of the country-specific time-series.

Since the introduction of the common workflow in 2022, the landing statistic data are queried and updated annually retroactively back to 2009 (data from DE, NL DK and BE) from the EFLALO database.

During the 2024 meeting, the transition (which started in 2023) towards using a common workflow for uniform data retrieval of international survey data from the ICES DATRAS database was continued. The transition also involves the inclusion of Belgian survey data; both tasks are still in progress but are to be implemented at the 2025 meeting.

To investigate a possible change in fishing effort at regional level, it was decided to analyse the time-series of the available VMS data of the individual countries, however due to data delivery issues the analyses had to be postponed until the next working group meeting.

All workflows of WGCRAN are stored and made accessible at GitHub.