Stingrays are caught in enormous numbers as bycatch in coastal fisheries, facing welfare problems from trawl stress, deck exposure, and discard mortality with little regulatory attention.
Stingrays suffer welfare harms that are largely invisible because they are discarded at sea rather than landed. The experience of capture in a trawl net is highly stressful, involving compression, hypoxia, and physical injury from contact with other catch. Many rays die during the trawl or shortly after discard. Manta rays targeted for gill plates are killed in directed fisheries that cause significant individual suffering and threaten population viability. The lack of regulatory attention to elasmobranch welfare reflects a broader gap in fisheries management that prioritizes target species while treating all bycatch as an externality.