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 […]
Expert advice on glass eel, elver, yellow eel and silver eel management issues
Author: Dr. Will O'Connor
Ireland’s elver monitoring sites not operating again
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 […]
Endoparasites affect eel swimming behaviour
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 […]
ESB’s elver trap at Ardnacrusha: 1997 and 2014 compared
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, […]
What will be done to help elvers on the Shannon this year?
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. […]
Decision regarding ESB eel kill outstanding
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 […]
Review of ESB’s eel trap and transport programmes
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 […]
Inadequate silver eel mitigation on the Shannon
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 […]
Low elver catches at ESB dams despite upturn
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 […]
Tour of ESB’s and IFI’s elver traps, Summer 2014
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 […]
More comment on IFI’s elver traps
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 […]
European Eel Foundation 