The greatest threat to this species is the commercial scale harvest for human food across its range. The largest fishing grounds for this species occur in the North Sea, the West of Scotland and the Irish Sea. It is also taken in the Bay of Biscay, the Iberian coast, Moroccan coast, Western and Eastern Mediterranean, and the Adriatic but in much smaller quantities (Bell, Redant and Tuck 2006).

Levels of fishery exploitation vary widely between individual stocks (Bell, Redant and Tuck 2006). ICES assessments indicate that many of the stocks with a long history of exploitation in the North Sea, to the west of Scotland and in the Irish and Celtic Seas, are fully exploited in terms of yield per recruit, but stock levels are relatively stable and with no evidence of recruitment declines (ICES 2003, 2004). New fisheries have developed over recent years on some large offshore stocks in the North Sea (notably the Fladen Ground and Norwegian Deeps) and there appears to be scope for further increases in fishing pressure on these grounds. In contrast. there have been declines in stock abundance in some southern areas, including the Bay of Biscay and, particularly, Atlantic shelf edge grounds around the Iberian peninsula, but it is not clear that recruitment declines have resulted from overexploitation (M. Bell pers. comm. 2010).

Trawling is the primary method of fishing. Vulnerability to trawling is strongly related to burrow emergence behaviour, and in areas where much of the fishing occurs in winter (e.g. the Farn Deeps grounds) there is a lower fishing mortality of females owing to the non-emergence of ovigerous individuals. Small creel fisheries also occur, notably in sea lochs in the west of Scotland. This is considered a more sustainable method of fishing than trawling, although there are concerns that larger numbers of ovigerous females are taken in creels (M. Bell pers. comm. 2010).