How the European eel population crisis affects individual eel welfare and what conservation responses help both populations and individuals.
Wild eel welfare is inseparable from the conservation crisis that is pushing the species toward extinction. Individual eels face welfare harms at multiple life stages: glass eels that cannot pass migration barriers and are trapped below dams; yellow eels with swim bladders compromised by invasive parasites that cannot regulate buoyancy effectively; silver eels undertaking spawning migrations through fisheries that intercept them before they can complete their reproduction. The welfare intervention that most benefits individual eels is also the conservation intervention most needed by the population: removing and bypassing river barriers to allow unimpeded migration, reducing turbine mortality at hydroelectric facilities, and eliminating eel mortality in fisheries.