A slippery tale of human greed, climate change and the mysteries of the deep
On a warm morning in mid-March, a group of researchers from Ferrara University examine their catch after delicately emptying out a net from the mouth of the Valli di Comacchio, a vast system of wetlands in the province of Ferrara, on the eastern Adriatic coast of Italy. It takes a trained eye to spot a glass eel amongst the thousands of other tiny fish. Just over a year old, the eels are a few centimetres long, thin and spindly, and virtually transparent. The investigators count twenty-nine. One pauses and turns to his colleagues with something close to jubilation. “A success,” he declares, “usually, there are far fewer”.
Until a couple of decades ago, the same net placed around the same period of the year would have harvested at least a thousand glass eels, all destined to populate the surrounding wetlands, or ‘valleys’ in the local parlance. Much has changed since then. The number of eels arriving in Comacchio today is only two to three per cent of the figure for the 1970s and 1980s. LIFEEL, the research project in which the University of Ferrara is participating, aims to understand the reasons behind the eel population’s steep decline, not just in Comacchio, but around the world.
LIFEEL is the first conservation project for the species conceived at the entire Po River basin scale, with the goal to increase and maintain the wild population of Anguilla anguilla (European eels).
