Dire Straits: Can a fishing ban save the elusive European eel?

The eel traps are lengthy, V-shaped, diagonally from shore to shore on Italy’s Comacchio lagoons, pointing like arrowheads out into the Adriatic Sea. Because the eels make their strategy to their ocean spawning grounds, aluminum plates enable them to enter the lure however not exit. Steel changed wooden and reed within the Eighties, however in any other case the lure design is similar because it was in historic occasions.

On a latest foggy morning in Comacchio, I met Stefano Gelli, who was cleansing a lure in one of many Lagoons’ northern basins. When Gelli was rising up, 40 years in the past, an evening’s catch may complete 10 tonnes.

Sixteen, seventeen, Gelli Gelli grabbed the slimy fish and tossed them right into a plastic tub, the place they slid into one another in slimy circles. Eighteen, nineteen. He threw within the final one. Comacchio’s eels as soon as crammed the lagoon; now they match right into a bucket.

For hundreds of years, the recognition of this fatty fish has made eels the spine of poor males’s diets throughout the continent. They have been served in soups and risottos in Italy, fried right into a crispy cracker and piled excessive, boiled to a comfortable texture in Scandinavia, floated in a rusty hen in Britain, smoked in Germany and the Netherlands, and loved as a Christmastime staple all over the place.

For a lot of biologists, closing the European eel fishery looks like the final possibility left after years of neglect.

Nevertheless, the catastrophe that has been the collapse of the European eel inhabitants over the previous half century has left the species now at risk of going the way in which of the passenger pigeon. In 2008, the Worldwide Union for Conservation of Nature took the step of classifying the European eel ( Anguilla Anguilla ) as critically endangered. On the similar time, the European Union adopted a complete regulation establishing measures to help the restoration of shares, together with by way of seasonal fishing closures and limits.

However restoration has didn’t materialise, and scientists now say solely pressing and radical motion can save the enduring fish. In its 2024 annual report, the Worldwide Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) – the regional fisheries advisory physique whose findings supplied the idea for the EU EEL regulation – is now urging that there needs to be zero soak up all habitats. “For a lot of biologists, closing the eel fishery, at the least briefly, looks like the final possibility left after years of neglect. It is a century of ‘We all know the issue and we haven’t confronted it’,” Willem Dekker, a Dutch biologist often known as the architect of the EU EEL regulation, instructed me.


Eels have been directly a well-recognized a part of European tradition and a thriller to all who studied them. Aristotle tried to crack the puzzle of eel replica as early as 300 BC, ultimately concluding that the fish will need to have magically emerged from muddy riverbeds. On the time, nobody had ever discovered eel intercourse organs. Nor had they witnessed eels reproducing within the wild, a web page within the scientific document that is still clean to at the present time: No pair of European eels have ever been caught within the act.

Dire Straits: Can a fishing ban save the elusive European eel?

Fishermen fishing in Comacchio, Italy.
Andrea Izzotti / vecteezy

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European eels are born within the Sargasso Sea, an amorphous physique of water within the western Atlantic Ocean bordered not by land however by shifting ocean currents. The tiny, clear larvae are then carried by the present to the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of Europe. There they full their first metamorphosis into longer, however nonetheless clear, glass eels. Glass eels journey up freshwater streams and rivers, the place they settle right into a everlasting house, residing for years or a long time as longer, darker yellow eels earlier than ultimately remodeling into shiny silver eels and reproducing. At that time, some unknown pressure calls them to swim to unfathomable depths as they migrate practically a thousand miles again to the Sargasso Sea, the place they have been born, after which die.

Each the ovaries and testicles of the European eel develop in earnest solely on their strategy to the Sargasso Sea, and it wasn’t till the late 1700s that the ovaries of a feminine eel (from the Comacchio lagoons) have been first recognized by way of meticulous anatomical dissection. The testicles took even longer to seek out. A younger Sigmund Freud—then a medical pupil on his strategy to turning into a thinker of sexual repression—was considered one of many males who went above and past the knife to seek out the eel’s reproductive organs.

The marketplace for younger European eels is strongest in Asia, the place traffickers are transporting staggering portions of glass eels.

The eel’s mysterious life cycle defies commonplace fisheries science. To create administration plans, biologists sometimes depend on a determine referred to as spawning inventory biomass, or SSB, which is calculated as the full biomass of spawning grownup fish. As a result of spawning grownup European eels conceal removed from sight at the hours of darkness depths of the Atlantic, there isn’t any strategy to precisely estimate the species’ SSB. “Fish inventory evaluation is a routine enterprise and includes a number of math,” says Willem Dekker. “There are protocols for the best way to do it. Within the case of the European EEL, the individuals doing it don’t have any data, no knowledge, no subtle fashions that make life simple, which makes it a lot tougher.”

Nobody has discovered the best way to artificially breed and develop eels. Scientists have managed to induce European eel replica in laboratories by way of hormone remedies, however the issue of figuring out the environmental and dietary situations that eel larvae have to survive signifies that few eels are raised for greater than three months. In consequence, eel farms should depend on a provide of untamed, worthwhile glass eels that may then be grown on a business scale. The marketplace for younger European eels is strongest in Asia, the place traffickers are transport staggering portions of glass eels to feed Japan’s urge for food for the fish, in direct violation of a 2010 EU regulation that bans the export of eels past EU borders.

Young glass eels at a fishery in Storkow, Germany.

Younger glass eels at a fishery in Storkow, Germany.
Patrick Pleul / DPA Image-alliance / Alamy Inventory Photograph

As regulators can not depend on aquaculture to satisfy market demand and scale back strain on wild eel shares, they’ve needed to give attention to extra direct conservation methods. However they’re struggling to give you options, as a result of the explanations for the collapse of the European EEL are usually not simple. Knowledge assortment has revealed a 15% annual decline within the stage of glass eel reaching European shores since 1980. It’s clear that numerous components are at play on this long-term decline, however the extent of every is unsure.

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Overfishing, it appears, is just one piece of the puzzle, because the failure of EU fishing laws to supply a restoration reveals. One other is the destruction of habitat, resembling dams, hydroelectric dams and land reclamation, which have lower off essential migration routes. Illnesses resembling Anguillid herpesvirus , in addition to heavy metals and pollution, are additionally identified to cut back the probabilities of eels reproducing, and a warming Atlantic could also be altering the streams eels depend on to finish their life cycle. The latest rise in unlawful commerce in juveniles to Asia has actually put one other dent within the inhabitants.

“Individuals need a clear reply, however we are able to’t give it,” admitted Caroline Durif, one of many present chairs of the ICES working group on eels. Requested what the explanation for the steep decline of eels was, Willem Dekker stated, “I don’t know. Fully stopped. Fishing, habitat loss, air pollution, all that stuff, no one is aware of.”

The thriller surrounding the eel allowed completely different teams with their very own priorities to shift blame for the collapse.

Để cấm bắt giữ lươn châu Âu, theo đề xuất của ICES, Nghị viện châu Âu sẽ cần phải bãi bỏ và sửa đổi Chỉ thị hiện tại của EU yêu cầu các quốc gia phải áp dụng các biện pháp để hỗ trợ cho sự phục hồi của cổ phiếu. Điều này dường như không thể cho rằng một cuộc bỏ phiếu của ủy ban năm 2023 về một nghị quyết kêu gọi cam kết mới đối với quy định đã giành được sự hỗ trợ của 80 phần trăm của các đại biểu hiện tại. Không có ý chí nào để cấm, và nó cũng sẽ không giúp ích gì, ông Andrew Andrew Kerr, chủ tịch của một liên minh phi lợi nhuận gồm các nhà bảo tồn, nhà khoa học và ngư dân thương mại được gọi là nhóm lươn bền vững (SEG), nói với tôi về cuộc gọi video từ Nhà anh ở Anh. Con lươn phức tạp hơn thế nhiều, và nếu bạn ngừng câu cá, bạn sẽ không cứu được con lươn. Những gì bạn cần là một mức độ câu cá rất có kiểm soát, nhưng chúng tôi phải làm việc trên tất cả các yếu tố môi trường.

Durif thừa nhận rằng EU vẫn cần một số thuyết phục từ cộng đồng khoa học trước khi nó sẽ chấp nhận giới hạn không bắt được. EU EU đang làm việc để đưa ra một yêu cầu đặc biệt cho ICES để xem liệu chúng tôi có thể đo lường hiệu quả của quy định hay không, mà chúng tôi tiếp tục nói rằng chúng tôi không thể, cô nói. Bà lưu ý rằng lời khuyên cho lệnh cấm tuân theo cách tiếp cận phòng ngừa, một nguyên tắc thường được thống nhất trong nghề cá để thực hiện các biện pháp quản lý, tuy nhiên quyết liệt, nhằm đạt được các điểm dân số cụ thể. Vì chúng tôi không có dữ liệu để nói rằng điều này hay điều đó, thủy điện hay nghề cá, nên gây ra tử vong nhiều hơn, chúng tôi không thể đưa ra lời khuyên cho ít hơn [than a ban]hoặc lời khuyên chính xác hơn.

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Một con diệc xám có một con lươn châu Âu ở Aberdeen, Scotland.

Một con diệc xám có một con lươn châu Âu ở Aberdeen, Scotland.
Kho ảnh Alex Penn / Alamy

Các bí ẩn xung quanh con lươn cho phép các nhóm khác nhau với các ưu tiên riêng của họ để thay đổi sự đổ lỗi cho sự sụp đổ. SEG lập luận rằng trọng tâm quản lý nên đảm bảo rằng thủy tinh thủy sản, nhà phân phối, trang trại, nhà máy khói và nhà bán lẻ, chiếm khoảng 90 % thị trường pháp lý châu Âu, hoạt động trong giới hạn của các quy định hiện hành của EU. Nhóm đã phát triển một tiêu chuẩn cho tất cả các nhà khai thác thương mại theo dõi chứng nhận SEG và cũng đang thúc đẩy chống buôn bán đến châu Á.

Kerr đã viết thư cho EU trong hơn một thập kỷ và đã nói chuyện với các nhà chức trách tập hợp tại The Hague về vấn đề các lô hàng lươn thủy tinh bất hợp pháp. Ông đã mất một thời gian dài để làm cho EEL trở thành một ưu tiên của EU trong việc phản tác dụng, ông nói. Vào cuối những năm 2010, các cuộc đàn áp của cảnh sát đã tăng tốc. Phát hiện năm 2017 của lươn thủy tinh trị giá 547.000 đô la được giấu dưới các thùng cá hợp pháp khác ở sân bay Heathrow đã sản xuất tiêu đề buôn bán làm cho Eels ‘có giá trị như cocaine’. Chiến dịch Hồ, được điều phối bởi Interpol từ năm 2022 đến 2023, dẫn đến việc bắt giữ 256 người bị nghi ngờ buôn bán lươn bất hợp pháp.

In Sweden, the specter of hydroelectric vegetation to eel migration is estimated to be equal to or larger than that of fishing.

Fishermen throughout Europe worry their livelihoods are being upended by the fishing ban, and so they say authorities ought to tackle different identified mortality components. In Sweden, the risk posed by the nation’s 2,300 hydroelectric vegetation, whose generators usually shred eels to shreds, is estimated to be equal to or larger than that posed by fishing. The Häno Coast in southeastern Sweden, also called the Eel Coast, is a gaggle of fishermen and activists campaigning to protect the area’s fishing traditions, which date again to medieval occasions, when eels have been used as cash to pay taxes, hire and money owed, and survive within the type of conventional eel dinners inside fishermen’s properties. Dafvid Hermansson, an area historian and board member of the EEL Coast cultural heritage web site, criticized policymakers for dodging questions on hydroelectric generators and habitat degradation, opting as an alternative for low fishing restrictions. Lower than 1 p.c of the grownup, mature eels that go away Sweden’s shores are caught, he claimed.

Scientists, nonetheless, are nearly unanimous in sustaining that imposing a fishing ban is important, if not essentially adequate. Giuseppe Castaldelli, a advisor biologist for the Po Delta Park, which manages the Comacchio lagoons, asserts: We don’t need to extinguish the fishery. Custom ought to keep. It’s excellent. It’s the historical past of those locations. But when we have to cease fishing for 5 years, cease fishing for 5 years. Inhabitants numbers proceed to say no; quickly we threat falling beneath the survival threshold of the species.

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