By 2019, the Common Fisheries Policy will prohibit discarding in all European fisheries of any pelagic, demersal or shellfish species for which removals are managed by TACs and quotas or minimum sizes. However, the regulation allows for exemptions from the prohibition for species for which scientific evidence demonstrates high survival rates associated with discarding. Producing reliable evidence of high survival typically requires long and costly studies involving tagging or captivity. This paper proposes to use the capacity to resist air exposure, a key stressor for discarded animals, as a proxy for survival that can be used to prioritize candidate species for more in-depth discard survival studies. The time required to induce mortality (TM) in... |