Eel stock assessments
The chart below shows indices of glass eel and yellow-silver eel
stocks based on catch data from a number of European countries who
report data to ICES. Overall, the catch levels are now the lowest
they have been in the past 50+ years.
In England and Wales, assessment of eel stock status is based
mainly on catch per unit effort (cpue) data reported to the
Environment Agency as there have been few fishery independent
surveys of eel stocks. Recent trends are similar to other European
datasets. The glass eel mean cpue level in the 2000s is only about
7% of that from the 1980s, and the mean cpue for yellow and silver
eel combined in the 2000s is half that for the 1990s (data scarce
for the 1980s).
Reprinted from the
2008 Report of the joint EIFAC/ICES Working Group on Eel
(WGEEL)