Report of the Blue Shark Stock Assessment Meeting (hybrid/Madrid, Spain, 17-21 July 2023)

The Blue Shark Stock Assessment Meeting was held 17-21 June 2023 in hybrid format at the ICCAT Secretariat in Madrid, Spain, to assess North Atlantic and South Atlantic stocks. The Group also reviewed the results of the Shark Research and Data Collection Program (SRDCP) workshop and advanced work on recommendations and responses to the Commission, but its primary focus was on the stock assessment. With respect to the available assessment data, some CPCs had updated their data after the deadline established at the Data Preparatory Meeting, but the difference between the resulting updated Task 1 and the data used for assessment modeling was less than 0.5%. Therefore, catch data used for modeling were not updated to include these revisions. Both stocks were assessed using JABBA and SS3 platforms. References cases were developed for both JABBA and SS3 models for both the North and South Atlantic stocks and their joint distributions were used to develop management advice.