Recent sampling by the Sustainable Eel Group and Somerset Eel Recovery Project has found no traces of eels in the drainage ditches of the Somerset Levels.
This unique landscape of wetland and coastal plain land was once teeming with eels, and experts suggest that water barriers are to blame for the recent lack of such wildlife.
Andrew Kerr, chair of the Sustainable Eel Group, said: "In the drainage ditches, we found no eel DNA. The river simply isn’t feeding the eels into the Levels, because they cannot cross the barriers."
The barriers were put in place to stop water from the Levels reaching homes and valuable farmland, making them extremely necessary and the hunt for a solution more difficult.
Kerr also believes that a 50-year old electric pumping station is also to blame for the reduction of the eel population, effectively isolating and killing them by not allowing them to migrate.
Though he doesn't believe that removing this system is the right way to fix things: "Nobody would expect you to turn it into a wilderness because you’d lose all that productive farmland. But what we have to do is find solutions to the blocked migration pathways."
Eel populations have estimated to have decreased as much as 90% since the 1980s, which is why Somerset's eel preservation groups are hard at work looking for solutions to get their eel population back, and the drainage ditches filled with familiar life again.
