Critically Endangered
Common skate
Dipturus batis
Common skate is a shark or ray in the family Rajidae (order Rajiformes) — Dipturus batis, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
Overall shape features a pointed snout and rhombic shape, with a row of spines or thorns along the tail. The top surface is generally coloured olive-grey to brown, often with a pattern of spots, and the underside is lighter blue-grey. The blue skate has a pointed and long snout and can have from 0-3 interdorsal thorns, though it is usually 1-2.
The blue skate can reach up to 1.43 m (4 ft 8 in) in length.
Range and habitat
The blue skate is native to the northeast Atlantic. It is a bottom dwelling species mainly found at depths of 100–200 m, but it can occur as shallow as 30 m and as deep as 1,000 m. Blue skates prefer seabeds with a soft substrate, but have been found to occur over gravel, cobble, and rocky seabeds.
The blue skate's population has drastically decreased because of overfishing and it likely will disappear entirely unless more is done to preserve it.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
Its diet consists of crustaceans, clams, oysters, snails, bristle worms, cephalopods, and small to medium-sized fish (such as sand eel, flatfish, monkfish, catsharks, spurdog, and other skates). The size of the individual can affect its diet.
Larger ones eat larger things like fish. The blue skate does not feed only on creatures at the bottom of the ocean, as some do ascend to feed on mackerel, herring, and other pelagic fish, that are caught by rapidly moving up from the seabed to grab the prey.
In crisis
Where previously abundant, fisheries directly targeted this skate and elsewhere it is caught incidentally as bycatch. The former species was uplisted to critically endangered on the IUCN Red List in 2006 and it is protected within the EU. The blue skate is listed as a critically endangered species by the IUCN and it is threatened both in the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea.
It has both been targeted directly and caught incidentally as bycatch. Due to the profitability of trawl fishing, bycatch likely will remain a serious problem for the blue skate.
Common skate is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Common skate, Wikidata item Q1421947. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
