Friends of the River Crane Environment

On April 22nd at Mogden Sewage Treatment Works the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) is offering training in how to check the newly installed eel pass and trap. Last year volunteers recorded 565 eel on their way through the pass, heading up into the Crane catchment as part ZSL’s pan London monitoring project. Due to very large reductions in the number of elvers (young eels) entering European rivers, since the 1980s, the European eel has been listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Nature Conservation (IUCN). One of the problems believed to be causing this crash in recruitment is the loss of freshwater habitat due to the drainage of wetlands and building of sluices and weirs that make upstream habitat inaccessible. By building passes we allow more eels to disperse into our rivers that will mature and return to the Sargasso to spawn. Monitoring of the trap runs from April to the end of September.

See ZSL Eel Monitoring flyer for more details and how to register.