This past summer, the World Fish Migration Foundation along with its partners published the Living Planet Index report for Migratory Freshwater Fish. The findings were dramatic. Since 1970, migratory fish populations have declined by 76 % globally (for Europe, there is a 93 % decline). There is a specific section on eel, describing its complex life cycle involving long migrations and showing the dramatic decline.
Also, the World Fish Migration Foundation along with 19 partners has recently published facts about the true level of river fragmentation in Europe in Nature. Thanks to AMBER – the Horizon2020 project – we learnt that in continental Europe there are at least 1.2 million barriers, of which at least 156,000 are obsolete, and this is one of the main reasons why migratory fish are going extinct.
Now, the World Fish Migration Day has started a petition; an urgent call for all governments, the European Union and the United Nations to protect the last free flowing rivers in the world from any barrier construction and to start removing river barriers.
We truly need to recover our rivers and our fish! If you have not already done so, please support the cause and sign the petition – to the benefit of eels and all other migratory fish in the world.
If you have any question or want to sign the petition, contact Pao Fernández Garrido at pao@fishmigration.org.