June 28, 2021 — The return of glass eels to Japan improved this year, but a subcommittee of the Fisheries Policy Council meeting held in Tokyo approved maintaining the current cap on the number that can be stocked to aquaculture ponds in line with a regional resource management agreement.
The amount of elvers of the Japanese eel, anguilla japonica, collected in Japan had been in decline since the latter half of the 1950s, corresponding with channelization of rivers for flood control and filling of wetlands for reclamation.