| Summary: | European hake (Merluccius merluccius) is widely distributed over the Northeast Atlantic shelf, from Norway to Mauritania, with a larger density from the British Islands to the south of Spain and in the Mediterranean and Black sea (ICES, 2015a). Hake is commercially exploited since the eighteenth century (Casey and Pereiro, 1995) but, unlike other gadoids as cod and haddock that supported important fisheries for centuries, large‐scale hake fishery began during the first half of the twentieth century. The European hake is a demersal and benthopelagic species, found mainly between 70 and 370 m depth; however, it also occurs in inshore waters (30 m) and down to depths of 1000 m (Cohen et al., 1990). Juvenile and small Europe hake usually live on muddy beds on the continental shelf, whereas large adult individuals are found on the shelf slope, where the bottom is rough and associated with canyons and cliffs. These biological characteristics make hake catches appears in most of metiers. Fleets involved use a variety of gears including otter trawlers, pair‐trawlers, gillnetters, longliners and, mainly in the southern case, a very heterogeneous small scale fleet –where also gears as traps, hand lines and small trammel nets are present—. Hake is caught in mixed fisheries together with megrim, monkfish, Nephrops, blue whiting, horse mackerel and mackerel depending in all cases on the area and the gear used.
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