The Relationship between Personal Commitment to Angling and the Opinions and Attitudes of German Anglers towards the Conservation and Management of the European Eel Anguilla anguilla

Abstract

In response to the dramatic decline of the European eel Anguilla anguilla population, the European Union member states developed eel conservation programs. To facilitate program development, a thorough understanding of eel angler perceptions about the degree of the current eel decline, their potential contribution, and their perceptions about the ways forward is important. In 2007, we sent a self-administered mail questionnaire to 640 anglers living in northeastern Germany asking them about a range of eel conservation and management issues. Respondents were segmented according to their degree of eel angling commitment. We tested a range of hypotheses, including whether highly committed eel anglers would feel greater concern about the eel decline than less committed anglers. In contrast to expectations, all identified angler groups had experienced a similarly pronounced eel decline. While high-centrality eel anglers were found to be somewhat more concerned with the decline, they exhibited less willingness to limit current eel angling effort than other anglers to help conserve eels. Highly committed eel anglers also rated the potential contribution of the recreational eel harvest as less important a contributor to the current state of the eel population than did less involved anglers. These findings can be explained by the greater resource dependency of highly committed anglers in light of the belief that recreational harvesting is not a significant issue for eel conservation. We conclude that the evaluation of fisheries conservation and management by differently committed anglers is affected by their perception of contributing to stock declines, the consumptive nature of the fishery, the dependency on the resource to meet experience preferences, and the degree to which potential regulations are perceived as threatening access to a fishery with a limited number of acceptable substitutes.

Received May 2, 2011; accepted January 11, 2012

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The project was funded by the European Financial Instrument for Fisheries Guidance (2000–2006) and the State of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Funding was also provided by the Adaptfish-Project to RA through a grant within the Pact for Innovation and Research by the Leibniz-Community (www.adaptfish.igb-berlin.de). Funding for the finalization of this project was also provided by the German Ministry for Education and Research within the project Besatzfisch (www.besatz-fisch.de, grant 01UU0907). We thank the anglers participating in this survey and those providing helpful insights during the pretests. We also thank USUMA GmbH (Berlin, Germany) for field work. Ben Beardmore, three reviewers, the Associated Editor and the Editor Richard Eades provided very valuable comments on an earlier version of the present paper.