The eel fishery in Lough Neagh, Northern Ireland – an example of sustainable management?

Abstract

Lough Neagh produces over 500 t of grown eel annually and employs 300 people fishing yellow and silver eel. Glass eel are transported upstream and stocked into the Lough. Since glass eel returns crashed in the 1980s, additional glass eel seed has been purchased from other fisheries. The fishery now faces ecological, social and economic pressures. Prices for the product have fallen; recruitment to the fishery has declined, and seed has decreased in availability and increased in price. Fishers are less inclined to take up the hard work required to make a living fishing eel and the fisher population is ageing. The European Commission has recognised the decline of eel and proposed emergency measures, which may further affect the viability of the fishery. The sustainability of the fishery is examined, based on the relationship between glass eel input and grown eel outputs over a period of 45 years, set against increasing environmental, socio-economic, and natural resource pressures. Spawning escapement of silver eel is estimated by mark-recapture experiments. K E Y W O R D S :Anguilla anguilla, eel, fishery management, stock recruitment.

A user-friendly tool to assess management plans for European eel fishery and conservation

“…The qualitative information provided is transformed into numbers on the basis of type and geographical location of the water body. The wide range of values into which the qualitative scale is mapped encompasses the few available estimates (Rosell et al, 2005; Alain Crivelli, unpublished data) integrated with anecdotic information.…”

Silver eel population size and escapement in a Mediterranean lagoon: Bages-Sigean, France

“…Bias (3) we also think is negligible because Bages-Sigean lagoon has an open access to the sea. Although in large rivers the pre-migrant eels may take several years before reaching the estuary (Feunteun et al, 2000;Rosell et al, 2005), a one-to-one relation between pre-migrant eels and silver migrant eels is assumed in small catchments (Acou et al, in press). Moreover, no marked eels were recaptured by the fishermen the following year, which supports the idea that all eels attempted to migrate.…”

Integrating habitat restoration and fisheries management : A small-scale case-study to support EEL conservation at the global scale

“…The reduction of fishing mortality is related to on-going socio-economic processes, such as a shift in fishing effort towards other more lucrative target species, reduced interest of the market towards eel and fishers ageing. This is a feature common to several small scale eel fisheries, such as the one operating in the Lough Neagh (Rosell et al, 2005), one of the largest fisheries in Europe. In this scenario stocking, albeit still practiced to sustain the local eel stock and related fishery, plays a different role, sustaining silver eel production and escapement, with important implication for eel conservation.…”

“…Sex ratio is skewed towards 04p8 (Rosell et al, 2005); River Havel system lakes: 45 mm·yr −1 (Simon, 2007); Jeziorak Lake (Poland): 41 mm·yr −1 (Nagiec and Bahnsawy, 1990). Yet, growth rates similar to those observed in Bolsena have been reported also in other Mediterranean populations such as Vaccarès Lagoon (France), 90 mm·yr −1 (Acou et al, 2003) (Capoccioni, 2012).…”