African glass eels are being smuggled for Unagi, a delicacy, threatening biodiversity and local livelihoods. (Gordon O’ Brien)
When Lee Baumgartner talks about eels, his enthusiasm is palpable. But his tale of these slippery creatures quickly turns dark — a story of global trafficking, ecological collapse, and a little-known wildlife crime that has eclipsed even the trade in guns and drugs.
“The connection, it’s really crazy,” said the executive director and professor of fisheries and river management at the Gulbali Institute at Charles Sturt University in Australia.
“It’s driven by the demand in Asia for baby eels. It’s huge. And it’s a demand that comes from all over the world,” he told the Mail & Guardian on the sidelines of last week’s Oppenheimer Research Conference, where he delivered a presentation titled, ‘Drugs, guns and eels: The decline of Anguillid eels in East Africa and beyond’.
The conference — convened by Oppenheimer Generations Research and Conservation — brought together researchers, policymakers, and conservation leaders to advance African-led solutions to the biodiversity and climate crisis
“You’ve got these baby eels, called glass eels, which are about a year old, that are captured, and then transported to Asia, and then they’re put into the eel hatcheries and they’re used for this gourmet food called Unagi [the Japanese word for freshwater eels],” Baumgartner said.
“And, it’s just an amazing delicacy that people eat … The Anguillid eel is now the most trafficked animal in the world, and it’s all driven by this demand for Unagi in Asia.”
The numbers are staggering, he said. The annual illicit trade in glass eels is worth about $4.8 billion. The fish are trafficked from Europe, North America, Canada, Indonesia, and Africa, all bound for Asia’s lucrative markets.
In Mozambique, in the Limpopo River’s estuary, glass eels are illegally harvested and exported.
“There are actually people in Mozambique who have been shipped from Asia to harvest eels because they owe money to people in Asia, and they have to pay off their debts by catching eels. That’s how big this is,” Baumgartner said.
In 2019, the illegal eel trade was worth more than three billion euros, outstripping the trade in guns and drugs that year. Glass eels can fetch an astounding $6 000 per kilo on the black market, he said.
In Asia, they are kept in high-density tanks and fed a paste, getting fat not to reproduce, but to feed people. Largely, the global demand is driven by depleted Asian eel fisheries. Global demand is largely driven by depleted Asian eel fisheries.
“The bad thing is that if you like to eat eels and you fish them out, you can’t actually breed them in captivity, and the reason is because they breed 3km deep in the ocean. You can’t build a hatchery that is 3km deep,” he said.
“If you can’t breed them and you don’t have enough left, what do you do? You catch them from elsewhere and you ship them to Asia. And that’s what’s been happening all over the world.”
As law enforcement agencies such as Interpol and Europol cracked down on European smuggling rings in the Covid-era, traffickers looked for new frontiers.
“If it gets too hard to traffic eels in Europe, what do you do? You go to an area where there is lower compliance. That’s why Indonesia and East Africa have seen a boom recently because the compliance isn’t that high. We would really like to work with the governments to try and minimise it … because it’s really important for the fish.”
Baumgartner marvels at their complex migratory life cycle, from their enigmatic oceanic spawning to migration in and out of freshwater systems across the Western Indian Ocean, which remains poorly understood.
Recent population declines are driven by habitat degradation, overfishing, and the obstruction of migration pathways, compounded by the illegal trafficking of glass and silver eels.
The Limpopo River Basin is home to four species of Anguillid eels. They are born in the ocean, northeast of Madagascar.
“They drift on the ocean currents for up to a year, they wait for a new moon — no one knows why — they then transform into little transparent glass eels and move upstream. They go to the upper part of the river and stay there for the next 60 years,” Baumgartner said.
“On their 60th birthday, give or take, they go back to the ocean, swim back northeast of Madagascar, lay their eggs, and die. Over their lifetime, it’s a journey of about 15 000km.”
Theirs is a perilous journey.
“The first thing you’ll find when you’re a baby eel is you have to climb these big concrete walls in dams, and if you’re lucky enough, you get up to good habitat,” he said.
“Then when you have to go downstream, if someone has built a hydropower plant, you have to swim through a spinning turbine that’s twisting at 120 times per second … then bang, they lasted 60 years to get back to Madagascar and a hydropower dam chops them up.”
It’s not safe in the ocean either, where they are caught by poachers or eaten by whales and sharks.
An adult eel has one job: to get fat. “It has to eat as much as it can over 60 years to get as much oil in its body so that it can swim 4 500km because when they turn into a breeding eel, their backside closes over, their digestive system vanishes, and it turns into gonads.
“They’ve got one job and that’s to lay eggs or to fertilise the eggs. They need enough oil in them to sustain them for a 4 500km journey where you don’t eat.”
Even for scientists, who have studied them for decades, the eels remain an enigma. No one has ever seen an eel spawn in the ocean.
“There’s a huge knowledge gap as to where they end up at the end of this 4 000km journey.
“We know where their eggs turn up in the ocean so we suspect that we know where they go but no one has ever seen one actually breed in the wild. It’s one of nature’s big mysteries.”
Baumgartner points out that while Asian countries have a big demand for eels, people have been eating them for tens of thousands of years.
“Original tribes and people who lived on the rivers knew that if you caught an eel and ate an eel with its huge fat content, you would have enough to sustain you for days. It was big in Australia, big in traditional ways of life in Africa. It still is really big in Indonesia.”
The overfishing of baby eels is only part of the problem. “The other thing that we have to do is make sure our rivers are healthy so that if they do avoid the poachers, they still have to live for 60 years in the river.”
Every single population of Anguillid eels in the world is in decline, Baumgartner warns.
“Our biggest concern is that in 20 or 30 years, we might start to lose some species. That would be tragic.”
His institute’s international collaboration, through the Sustainable African Rivers Initiative (Sari), aims to avert that. It is a partnership with the North West University, University of Mpumalanga, Oppenheimer Generations Research Programme, SANParks, and Rivers of Life.
It was established 10 months ago to meaningfully contribute to the conservation and sustainable development of the rivers, lakes, wetlands, and estuaries of Sub-Saharan Africa for the biodiversity, ecosystems, and people who depend on these functioning ecosystems for their livelihoods.
“We’re working with all of these agencies to increase the understanding of eels. From our perspective, it’s so fascinating because the eels that we find in East Africa are also the same eels that we find in North West Australia and Indonesia,” Baumgartner said.
“We actually think that the eel populations are linked at the whole of the Indian Ocean level. If we can demonstrate that, it would show massive conservation significance, and we hope by generating that knowledge, people will start to pay attention.”
In the Limpopo River, the ecological and economic importance of eels — and other fish species — is immense, supporting food security, local livelihoods, and cultural traditions.
“A healthy river gives healthy communities.”
But the Limpopo River today tells a worrying story: fish kills, mining pollution, and green algal blooms. “We want to work really closely to try and turn this around, and it is completely turnaroundable because we did this to the river, we can undo this to the river.
“We want to see eel populations in the Limpopo River healthy. We want to see the glass eels free of harvest, we want to see the big eels up in the high ends of the system, living happy, healthy, long lives.”
Next month, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species is due to consider a proposal to regulate international shipments of all freshwater eel species.
“As a lover of eels, we really hope that they vote in the positive because it will give eels a lot more protection.”
He smiles at the irony.
“When I was a kid, they scared me — they looked like a snake, they were slimy, and they smelled a little bit. But my dad liked to eat them and I could never understand why … It wasn’t until later that I realised how fascinating these eels were.”