If you have seen a sand eel, it is probably in a cute picture on a wildlife calendar hanging out of the beak of a puffin on the way to feed its young. Almost certainly you would have also eaten some, either in the form of fish oil, or because you have dined on farmed salmon.
Raitt’s sand eel, Ammodytes marinus, is the most common of a number of species of sand eels that live round the coasts of Britain and has been so ruthlessly commercially fished it has become threatened. The 30cm eel-like fish bury themselves in the sand in winter but emerge in spring and summer to breed and become a vital part of the marine food chain. Normally, this and other species live in shoals of many thousands in and around sandy seabeds and are food for many seabirds and larger fish. Catches close to 500,000 tonnes a year, mostly landed in Denmark, have wiped out stocks and as numbers have decreased, some seabird colonies have starved for lack of food.
It has taken three decades of campaigning by a variety of scientists and environmental groups to finally get a ban on commercial sand eel fishing in the English and Scottish waters of the North Sea. The EU is contesting the ban but, meanwhile, stocks and seabird colonies could recover.
