For the third straight year, a Swedish research vessel trawling the Skagerrak and the Kattegat has found no glass eel at all.
The glass eel phase is the second stage of the severely threatened species’ evolution, after the larvae has come drifting to coastal waters on its long journey from the Sargasso Sea.
This annual test trawling done by the Swedish Board of Fisheries is primarily aimed at fry from North Sea herring, a control of the preceding fall spawning, but fry from sprat and glass eel are examined as a “by-catch”.
Small amounts of glass eel were found in the hauls in 2005-2007, but since then none at all, underlining the critical situation for the red-listed European eel.
The bad state of the eel in Swedish water has been obvious for many years. Millions of eel migrated up the Göta Älv river (connects to the Skagerrak at Göteborg) in the 1950’s – in 2008 some 100 did it, according to the Board of Fisheries. Fifty years ago tens of thousands were found in the Nyköpingsån river south of Stockholm on the Baltic Coast – in 2008 about ten.
In the fall of 2008, EU Fisheries Ministers called for the Member States to submit national management plans for the dwindling eel stocks to the Commission by the end of that year. The pronounced goal in the regulation is that 40 per cent of the eel in EU waters will be able to return to the Sargasso Sea to spawn.
The most radical national plan was announced by Ireland, which included a total eel fishing ban.
The national plans were to take force on July 1 last summer, but also subject to possible revision by the Commission. A management committee bas been treating them since then, approving most of them as the work has progressed, in some cases after modifications. That work is now “in its final stage”, according to a Swedish government source.
The Commission will present a report to the Parliament in 2012, and the whole process will be evaluated in 2013.