Freshwater eels: A symbol of the effects of global change

By H. Drouineau, C. Durif, M. Castonguay, M. Mateo, E. Rochard, G. Verreault, K. Yokouchi, P. Lambert. Fish and Fisheries, 2018

159 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Temperate eels Anguilla anguilla (European eel), A. rostrata (American eel) and A. japonica (Japanese eel) are three catadromous species which have been declining since the 1970s/1980s despite their remarkable adaptive capacity. Because of their specific life cycles, which share distant oceanic spawning grounds and continental growth stage, eels are affected by five components of the global change: (a) climate change affecting larval survival and drift, (b) an increase in pollution leading to high levels of contamination exacerbated by their high lipid levels, (c) increasing fragmentation and habitat loss that reduce dramatically the amount of available habitats and induce increased spawner mortality, (d) the appearance of Anguillicola crassus a parasitic alien nematode that impairs spawning success, and (e) the impact of commercial and recreational fisheries for all life stages of eel. In this context, the rapid increases of pressures during the "Great Acceleration" have surpassed the adaptive capacity of eels. This illustrates that cumulative effects of global change can lead to the collapse of species, even in species that have amazingly high adaptive capacities.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Physiology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bfd903d338ac8ce3e4b458e271ed6f45359242a3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Global and Planetary Change

1. Michael J. Miller
2. K. Tsukamoto
3. M. Castonguay
4. P. Sasal
5. T. Arai

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

1. Michael J. Miller
2. T. Pratt
3. K. Tsukamoto
4. M. Castonguay
5. K. Aarestrup

In Physiology

1. Michael J. Miller
2. K. Tsukamoto
3. M. Castonguay
4. T. Arai

Citations in the corpus

• Important questions to progress science and sustainable management of anguillid eels (2021, background): “More widely, a growing number of studies on tropical eels have led to increasing concerns about the stock status of many of these species (Drouineau et al., 2018; Gollock et al., 2018), and in 2011, the IUCN Anguillid Eel Specialist Sub- Group— which became the Anguillid Eel Specialist Group in 2015”