Content area
Full Text
Abstract. Records of catches and abundance indices from nine countries on the Atlantic seaboard indicate that the low level of catch observed throughout the 1980s has persisted. It is possible that this will lead to poor catches and low supply of breeding adults.
Keywords: eels, elver catches, statistics for Europe
Introduction
At the first meeting of the EIFAC Working Party on Eel in 1981, Jorgen Dahl presented a report on the capture of elvers in Europe which gave data from four participating countries. Since then, the number of countries reporting has increased to nine and three reports have been published (Moriarty 1986, 1990, 1992). Studies of local variations were published over the same period by Dekker (1986), Guerault and Desaunay (1990), Hagstrom and Wickstrom (1989), Hvidsten (1985) and Tesch et al (1986). All these studies agree that excellent catches of estuarine glass eel and riverine elvers were made in the 1960s and 1970s after which a severe decline was observed, begining early in the 1980s. The few long-term data sets available, namely those for the Ems, the Loire and Ijsselmeer (Moriarty 1990) show one or more periods of decline in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly one of ten years or more in the 1930s. Figures for the Gota Alv (Wickstrom 1990) suggest a continuing decline in recruitment to the Baltic over a period of twenty years or more. With few exceptions, notably the data for the Ijsselmeer (Dekker 1986), the long-term data sets suffer from the absence of information on fishing effort.
This paper presents new data for 1991 and 1992 and examines the figures collected since...