Title: Assessing the feasibility of combining monkfish- and hake-directed annual biomass surveys in Namibia.

Since 1990, Namibia has conducted annual hake biomass surveys in January and February for a period of six weeks, covering bottom trawl depths ranging from 80 to 700 metres at approximately 210 stations. Historically, monkfish have only been assessed as bycatch during hake surveys. The first annual monkfish biomass survey was conducted in November 2000, and the TAC was set in 2001. Biomass surveys for monkfish are now conducted annually in November for a period of three weeks, with 94 stations covering bottom depths ranging from 100 to 700m. The entire Namibian coastline was of interest during this study, spanning the various areas where monkfish and hake biomass surveys were conducted, to assess whether it was possible to combine hake and monkfish biomass surveys for estimating monkfish biomass while taking into account all factors, such as gear differences, survey design, biomass, size structure, spatial distribution, and survey time periods. A binomial GLM was performed to quantitatively estimate the size differences between the two surveys. If the Monkfish survey is merged with the Hake survey, the underrepresentation of smaller monkfish could become a major issue.