Moray Eel caught in Cornwall

[Jim Greenfield]

Reported recently in the Daily Mail as the first moray to be caught in UK waters, this is sure to lead to more conjectures about global warming.

I quote below what Doug Herdson (a marine scientist at Plymouth who tracks fish species has said about the report:

"Unfortunately it is inaccurate - This is actually the tenth Mediterranean Moray Muraena helena to be caught in British and Irish waters; the first was caught on a line at Polperro in Cornwall in 1834. (One was also found off Ostend, Belgium in 1937.) Also its actual weight was 3.8 kg and length 104 cm. They are a North East Atlantic fish being found from Senegal to the English Channel (and also in the Mediterranean). They are not a sign of global warming, but a warm water eel that is rare at the northern limit of its distribution. If climate change does continue to raise the sea temperatures around our coasts they may become commoner.

My report comes from Dave Munday of the MFA Fisheries Office in Newlyn who gives the position as ICES area VIIh square 27E4 - approx. 49 20’N 006 30’ W.

The literature, most notably Wheeler, Merrett and Quigley (2004) gives three previous Cornish records (all in the nineteenth century), one from Ostend, one Herm and one Irish; however I have checked through the records held by the Newlyn fisheries office and
find that a further three were landed to Newlyn in the 1990s, and Paul Gainey reports one off Land's End in 1989."

Jim Greenfield