Saving Seafood

  • Home
  • News
    • Alerts
    • Conservation & Environment
    • Council Actions
    • Economic Impact
    • Enforcement
    • International & Trade
    • Law
    • Management & Regulation
    • Regulations
    • Nutrition
    • Opinion
    • Other News
    • Safety
    • Science
    • State and Local
  • News by Region
    • New England
    • Mid-Atlantic
    • South Atlantic
    • Gulf of Mexico
    • Pacific
    • North Pacific
    • Western Pacific
  • About
    • Contact Us
    • Fishing Terms Glossary

The Utterly Engrossing Search for the Origin of Eels

September 27, 2022 — Every three years, Reinhold Hanel boards a research ship and voyages to the only sea in the world that’s located in the middle of an ocean. The Sargasso, bounded by currents instead of land, is an egg-shaped expanse that takes up about two-thirds of the North Atlantic, looping around Bermuda and stretching east more than 1,000 kilometers. Dubbed the “golden floating rainforest” thanks to the thick tangles of ocher-colored seaweed that blanket the water’s surface, the Sargasso is a slowly swirling sanctuary for over 270 marine species. And each year, the eels arrive.

The European eel and the American eel—both considered endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature—make this extraordinary migration. The Sargasso is the only place on Earth where they breed. The slithery creatures, some as long as 1.5 meters, arrive from Europe, North America, including parts of the Caribbean, and North Africa, including the Mediterranean Sea. Hanel, a fish biologist and director of the Thünen Institute of Fisheries Ecology in Bremerhaven, Germany, makes his own month-long migration here alongside a rotating cast of researchers, some of whom hope to solve mysteries that have long flummoxed marine biologists, anatomists, philosophers, and conservationists: What happens when these eels spawn in the wild? And what can be done to help the species recover from the impacts of habitat loss, pollution, overfishing, and hydropower? Scientists say that the answers could improve conservation. But, thus far, eels have kept most of their secrets to themselves.

The idea that eels have sex at all is a fairly modern notion. Ancient Egyptians associated eels with the sun god Atum and believed they sprang to life when the sun warmed the Nile. In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle proclaimed that eels spontaneously generated within “the entrails of the earth” and that they didn’t have genitals.

The no-genital theory held for generations. Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder asserted that eels rubbed against rocks and their dead skin “scrapings come to life.” Others credited eel provenance to everything from horses’ tails to dew drops on riverbanks. In medieval Europe, this presumed asexuality had real economic consequences and helped make the European eel a culturally important species, according to John Wyatt Greenlee, a medieval cartographic historian who wrote part of his dissertation on the subject. Frequent Christian holidays at the time required followers to adhere to church-sanctioned diets for much of the year. These prohibited adherents from eating “unclean” animals or meat that came from carnal acts, which could incite, as Thomas Aquinas put it, “an incentive to lust.” Fish were the exception, Greenlee says, and eels, given their abundance and “the fact that they just sort of appear and that nobody can find their reproductive organs at all,” appealed to anyone trying to avoid a sexy meal.

Read the full article at Smithsonian Magazines

Five jailed, fined €1.5m, for eel smuggling in Spain

June 17, 2019 — The Spanish National Court has prosecuted five people for breaching EU legislation — and endangered animal treaty CITES — by trying to smuggle European eel between 2011 and 2012.

The network attempted to remove 724 kilograms of live eels, with a value equating to €580,000, from Spain to Asia but were stopped in the first major operation carried out by SEPRONA, Spain’s nature protection service of the Civil Guard.

The network falsely documented the eels for transit to Asia as other species not subject to regulations, including the American eel, the California red worm, and the flathead grey mullet, according to a release from the Sustainable Eel Group.

The export and import of European eel out of and into the EU has been suspended since 2010. However, the scale of the illegal trade remains vast: according to Europol, 300 to 350 million European eels are illegally trafficked every year from Europe to Asia, accounting for almost one-quarter of the total number of glass (juvenile) eels entering European waters every year.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

EU declines to recommend endangered label for American Eel

April 26, 2016 — The European Union has decided not to recommend listing American Eel as an endangered species at the upcoming CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) Conference of the Parties, to be held later this year.

In a report submitted to CITES (“Conservation of and trade in Anguilla SPP.”), the EU and its Member States instead recommended funding for a study of eel species not listed as endangered by CITES and noted that data on eels in the Northeast U.S. is more comprehensive than elsewhere in the world.

The European Eel (Anguilla anguilla) has been listed in CITES Appendix II since 2009. Currently export and import of European Eel from and into the EU is illegal, and EU Member States have enacted a zero export quota for the species since 2011. That led to an increased demand for other eel species, and an increase in illegal trade. As the EU report explains, U.S. fisheries managers passed a harvest quota and regulations to limit the expansion of the harvest of American Eel (Anguilla rostrata). The U.S. harvest is restricted to one fishery in Maine and a smaller fishery in South Carolina.

The report states that, for American Eel, “there are data for most of this species’ life stages (glass, elver, yellow and silver) from the northern part of its range (Canada and central Atlantic States).” It is more critical of data on eels in the Caribbean, northern South America, and East Asia, and pushes for more information that would lead to effective conservation and management of eels.

In its recommendations, the EU encourages parties involved in the trade of eel species to provide CITES with specific information to inform a potential study, and to participate in workshops where they can share their expertise and knowledge on priority topics.

The EU report comes ahead of the CITES Seventeenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties, which will convene from September 24 to Octobers 5 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Read the full report at the European Commission of the European Union

Recent Headlines

  • EPA decision on Bristol Bay draws criticism and praise
  • The Shift to Renewable Energy Is Speeding Up. Here’s How.
  • ALASKA: Alaska salmon troll fleet under the gun over chinooks and killer whales
  • U.S. EPA’s move to block Pebble project in Alaska ‘unlawful’ – CEO
  • US FDA announces overhaul of its food-safety programs
  • Aquafeed companies issue ultimatum: Fix North Atlantic blue whiting issues or we’ll stop buying it
  • ALASKA: Kodiak crab strike ends after 2 weeks
  • Republicans vow EPA scrutiny in Pebble veto’s wake

Most Popular Topics

Alaska Aquaculture ASMFC Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission BOEM California Climate change Coronavirus COVID-19 Donald Trump groundfish Gulf of Maine Gulf of Mexico Illegal fishing IUU fishing Lobster Maine Massachusetts Mid-Atlantic National Marine Fisheries Service National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration NEFMC New Bedford New England New England Fishery Management Council New Jersey New York NMFS NOAA NOAA Fisheries North Atlantic right whales North Carolina North Pacific offshore energy Offshore wind Pacific right whales Salmon Scallops South Atlantic Tuna Western Pacific Whales wind energy Wind Farms

Daily Updates & Alerts

Enter your email address to receive daily updates and alerts:
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
Tweets by @savingseafood

Copyright © 2023 Saving Seafood · WordPress Web Design by Jessee Productions