This article was featured in Eurofish Magazine 5 2025.
Investigations from the Earth Journalism Network are uncovering the rapid decline of Mediterranean hake populations which is largely caused by the illegal farming and selling of juvenile hake on the black market. These juvenile hake nicknamed “merluzzetti” are illegal to sell, but seem to be extremely easy to purchase on fishing vessels close to docks on the western Italian coast. The shortest legal length for selling hake is 20 centimetres but the report states that in ports in Tuscany, Lazio, Campania, and Sicily, hake of just a few centimetres long were readily available to buy. Boxes of hake purchased from these docks have an average hake length of 7-15 centimetres. Oceana’s fisheries manager for the Mediterranean sea, Giulia Guadagnoli, says that “hake is in a state of total biological collapse” and that the species is unlikely to recover from such detrimental activity.
