The Wye and its slippery customers

Renowned for its salmon, the river once teemed with eel, too. No longer. So what is behind this poorly reported wildlife crime?

- MARSHA O'MAHONY

The eel has always suffered from an image problem: snake-like, slippery, slimy, they are at the opposite end of the social spectrum to the more ‘sophisticated’ salmon. Yet the human relationship with this mysterious fish reaches beyond the Egyptian dynasties – they even appear in the Domesday Book as a form of tax payment. But in the 21st century, trafficking of the species is at unprecedented levels and threatens the eel’s very existence. It wasn’t always thus.

On the River Wye, and on all water courses, the eel was once an important and cheap winter food source. Today, it is rarely eaten in the UK, other than by jellied-eel aficionados in the south-east. That might be because of taste or because they are just not as abundant any more. Their numbers have been in a serious state of decline for decades. Alarm at the shrinking salmon population pales in comparison with the plight of the eel.

Once upon a time on the Wye, a catch was weighed in kilos. Today, it’s far more likely to be grammes. But the eel has a champion in the Sustainable Eel Group (SEG), a Europe-wide conservation and scienceled organisation, working collaboratively with partner bodies to accelerate the eel’s recovery. SEG chair Andrew Kerr puts it into perspective, describing the eel’s perilous state as, “Europe’s greatest wildlife crime”.