Instead of opening up migration pathways for eels (and lampreys) in Ireland, our state agency Inland Fisheries Ireland (IFI) are, themselves, a major threat to eel and lamprey populations. In 2013 IFI installed this crump […]

Instead of opening up migration pathways for eels (and lampreys) in Ireland, our state agency Inland Fisheries Ireland (IFI) are, themselves, a major threat to eel and lamprey populations. In 2013 IFI installed this crump […]
We are very disappointed to report that many of Ireland’s national elver monitoring sites are not operational again this year in time for the elver run. This weekend we visited Inland Fisheries Ireland’s elver monitoring […]
A new paper entitled ‘Relationship between European eel Anguilla anguilla infection with non-native parasites and swimming behaviour on encountering accelerating flow‘ has just been published in the Journal of Fish Biology by Lynda Newbold et al. It examines […]
The 2014 juvenile eel catch on the River Shannon (from both Ardnacrusha and Parteen weir) came to only 354 Kg. This was only about 5% of the peak catches from these sites in the 1980’s, […]
As we head into March, the first runs of glass eels and elvers are arriving at the upper Shannon estuary. Soon they will be migrating up the River Shannon along with tributaries of the Shannon estuary. […]
A decision on whether to prosecute the ESB over a major kill of critically endangered juvenile European eels (or elvers) at their hydroelectric installation on the River Erne in County Donegal is still outstanding. The […]
To mitigate for the impacts of their hydropower dams, the ESB runs a number of ‘trap and transport’ schemes for upstream migrating juvenile eels (elvers), and downstream migrating silver eels. However, in this article we […]
The River Shannon has a large hydroelectric scheme in its lower reaches, and there are no bypasses for silver eels migrating downstream (or indeed for other fish such as salmon kelts and smolts). The ESB […]
The ESB have released their elver catch results for 2014, and confirm that the “elver run for the Shannon saw 354kg of elvers caught in total“. This is a very poor catch considering that this was […]
In response to our work earlier in the year where we showed that ESB were not operating elver traps on the River Shannon (at either Ardnacrusha or Parteen) by the first week of May, a […]
It’s not just the ESB that are at fault in relation to managing and monitoring elver runs in Ireland. Elvers are trapped or monitoring at 10 “index” sites in Ireland as part of the National […]