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Skates are arguably the most vulnerable of exploited marine fishes. Their vulnerability is often assessed by examining fisheries catch trends, but these data are not generally recorded on a species basis except in France. Aggregated skate catch statistics tend to exhibit more stable trends than those of other elasmobranch fisheries. We tested whether such apparent stability in aggregated catch trends could mask population declines of individual species. We examined two time series of species‐specific surveys of a relatively stable skate fishery in the northeast Atlantic. These surveys revealed the disappearance of two skate species, long‐nose skate (  Dipturus oxyrhinchus) and white skate (  Rostroraja alba) and confirmed a previously documented decline of the common skate (  D. batis). Of the remaining five skate species, the three larger ones have declined, whereas two smaller species have increased in …