Angling for data: Recreational anglers’ records of conger eel (Conger conger) landings from the English Channel between 1990-1991
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Aquaculture, Fisheries and Fish Science
- Keywords
- fisheries, angling, citizen science
- Copyright
- © 2016 Johnson et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Angling for data: Recreational anglers’ records of conger eel (Conger conger) landings from the English Channel between 1990-1991. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2361v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2361v1
Abstract
Declines in commercial fish stocks have been well documented through government records of catches. Here we demonstrate that records from anglers, if appropriately interpreted, can be used to provide detailed retrospective data on population trends in fish species. We highlight this with reference to records of conger eel from the British Conger Club that show a decline in size and abundance of conger through the 1990s, during which time the commercial extraction of the species increased markedly. Anglers’ records are a potentially important source of quantitative data on population trends of a number of poorly studied species.
Author Comment
The data provided by the BCC were previously incorporated in summarised form in Johnson & Hart (2001).
Supplemental Information
Conger data
Angling data for Conger conger from the English channel