Species for Sale: European Eel
by Thomas Gomersall
The European eel (Anguilla anguilla) is a snake-like fish found across much of Europe and parts of North Africa. It is catadromous, with adults migrating from freshwater to the Sargasso Sea off the east coast of North America, where they spawn and then die (IUCN Red List, 2020). After hatching, the larval eels spend on average two years travelling across the Atlantic, a journey that less than one in 500 of them will survive. They eventually reach the coast as glass eels (named for their transparent appearance during this life stage) when they swim upriver in their next life stage — elvers — before finding a suitable patch to develop into adult eels.
Item on Sale:
Due to the depletion of Japanese eel stocks, European eels have become highly sought after in Asian aquaculture as a replacement species, fetching up to 1,500 euros per kilogramme (Shiraishi & Crook, 2015). But as they cannot be easily bred in captivity, they are instead caught from the wild as glass eels and exported live to Asia — often crammed by the hundreds inside plastic bags in smugglers’ luggage — and sold to aquaculture farms to be reared to adulthood. Despite a 2010 European Union ban on all international eel trade, an estimated 300 million glass eels are still illegally exported from Europe to Asia every year (Bryce, 2016; Chung, 2020).
Hong Kong is an important transit point for eel smugglers en-route to China and Japan. According to the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department, between 2014 and 2018, more than 1,051 kilogrammes of illegal European eel shipments were seized here (Chan, 2020). Those that aren’t seized are later processed, packaged and reimported to Hong Kong (Knott, 2020), where a recent study found that around 45 per cent of eel meat products in local supermarkets — including raw, frozen and ready-cooked ones — are made from European eel (Richards et al, 2020).
Additionally, European eels are often traded alongside other similar-looking eel species (Musing et al, 2018) and when sold, they are not accurately labelled according to species (Richards et al, 2020), making it difficult to tell whether a given eel shipment or product is European eel or not (Chung, 2020). A lack of public awareness of the eel trade also contributes to the problem, as a survey of 130 people by WWF’s One Planet Youth programme’s ‘Eel-Pro-Road’ project revealed (Lam & Wong, 2020). “More than half of them did not know that eels are endangered, so they keep eating eel in restaurants or at home,” says project participant, Lillian Lam.
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European eels were once extremely common, accounting for up to 50 per cent of fish biomass in European freshwater ecosystems. But today, they are critically endangered due to overfishing, pollution, the climate crisis, invasive parasites and the obstruction of their migration routes by dams. While it’s unclear how significant each of these threats has been to their decline, given the high volumes of glass eels exported to Asia each year, overfishing is likely to be an important one (IUCN Red List, 2020; Chung, 2020).
Moreover, European eels are a favoured and important prey item for several freshwater predators, including threatened ones like the Eurasian otter (Britton et al, 2006). Eel flesh has a high fat content, making it particularly valuable for some species during their breeding seasons, when their energy demands are generally greater. Therefore, the loss of a once-abundant, highly nutritious food source could make it harder for these animals to survive (Chung, 2020).
How can Hong Kong help?
To effectively tackle the European eel trade, Hong Kong should embrace the latest forensic investigation techniques for wildlife crime, as many traditional ones don’t allow for rapid, species-level identification of imports at points of entry (Musing et al, 2018).
One new technique, known as a real-time polymerase chain reaction, was recently used to identify a large shipment of European eels at Chek Lap Kok Airport with 100 per cent efficiency in as little as two hours, leading to the first prosecutions of eel smuggling in Hong Kong (Cardeñosa et al, 2019). Another allows for the detection of DNA traces in the drainwater of wet markets to determine if they are keeping endangered species in their fish tanks. Greater use of these techniques would greatly increase detections of illegal wildlife imports and could help to deter smugglers and traders (Toropov, 2020).
Since 2016, WWF has been working with major supermarket chains in Hong Kong to phase out endangered species (including eels) from their supply chains (WWF-Hong Kong, 2020). This means asking their suppliers for regular genetic documentation to ensure that their eel products don’t include European eel and replacing them with ones made from less threatened species like the conger eel. It also means setting up their own genetics laboratories to test eel products themselves (Chan, 2020).
Of course, the simplest way for Hong Kongers to help is to just eat less eel, which might be easier than expected according to the results of the ‘Eel-Pro-Road’ project survey. Surprisingly, over half of the respondents said that they ate eel primarily for the taste of the sauce it was cooked in and around 30 said they would happily eat alternatives with the same sauce, such as eggplant (Lam & Wong, 2020). The hope is that greater awareness of these alternatives will spur a reduced demand for eel, both on a consumer and restaurant level. “Restaurants can do better,” says project participant,SY Wong. “They can sell other fish to replace eel.”
References:
· Britton, J.R., Pegg, J., Shepherd J.S. and S. Toms. 2006. Revealing the prey items of the otter Lutra lutra in South West England using stomach contents analysis. Folia Zoologica, vol. 55(2): 167pp.–174 pp.
· Bryce, E. ‘Illegal eel: who is pilfering Europe’s eel catch?’. The Guardian, 31 March 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/world-on-a-plate/2016/mar/31/illegal-eel-who-is-pilfering-europes-catch (Accessed: 14 February 2020).
· Cardeñosa, D., Gollock, M.J. and Chapman, D.D. 2019. Development and application of a novel real-time polymerase chain reaction assay to detect illegal trade of the European eel (Anguilla anguilla). Conservation Science and Practice, vol. 1: 1pp.–7pp.
· Chan, J. interviewed by Thomas Gomersall, 2020, WWF-Hong Kong.
· Chung, W.Y., interviewed by Thomas Gomersall, 2020, The University of Hong Kong.
· IUCN Red List, European Eel, [website], 2020, https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/60344/45833138#geographic-range (Accessed: 14 February 2020).
· Knott, K. ‘’One of the world’s biggest wildlife crimes’: glass eel smuggling and how Hong Kong supermarkets commonly sell endangered European eels’. South China Morning Post, 29 April 2020. https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/food-drink/article/3081913/one-worlds-biggest-wildlife-crimes-glass-eel-smuggling-and-how (Accessed: 22 September 2020).
· Lam, L. and Wong, S.Y., interviewed by Thomas Gomersall, 2020, WWF-Hong Kong.
· Musing, L., Shiraishi, H., Crook, V., Gollock, M., Levy, E. and K. Kecse-Nagy. 2018. Implementation of the CITES Appendix II listing of European Eel Anguilla anguilla. 1: 1pp.–82pp.
· Richards, J.L., Sheng, V., Chung, W.Y., Chan, L.Y., Ng., S.T., Sadovy, Y. and D.M. Baker. 2020. Prevalence of critically endangered European eel (Anguilla anguilla) in Hong Kong supermarkets. Science Advances, vol. 6(10): eaay0317.
· Shiraishi, H. and Crook, V. 2015. Eel market dynamics: An analysis of Anguilla production, trade and consumption in East Asia. Traffic Report: 1pp.–45pp.
· Stein, F.M., Wong, J.C.Y., Sheng, V., Law, C.S.W., Schröder, B. and D.M. Baker. 2016. First genetic evidence of illegal trade in endangered European eel (Anguilla anguilla) from Europe to Asia. Conservation Genetics Resources, vol. 8(4): 533pp.–537pp.
· Toropov, P., ‘New method to combat illegal wildlife trade reveals whether animals were raised in captivity or captured from the wild’. South China Morning Post, 9 July 2020, https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/3092329/new-method-combat-illegal-wildlife-trade-reveals-whether-animals-were (Accessed: 23 September 2020).
· WWF-Hong Kong, Illegally imported, critically endangered, [website], 2020, https://www.wwf.org.hk/en/whatwedo/oceans/supporting_sustainable_seafood/?24005/Illegally-imported-critically-endangered (Accessed: 19 June 2020).
