Irish factory helps eels slither on to the menus of Europe

Cod and chips beware; Ireland is preparing a quiet revolution in seafood with the first guaranteed large-scale supplies of eel. Alan Murdoch reports.

The eerie, wriggling silhouettes of tens of thousands of dark slithery creatures have a hypnotic effect. To their patient owners at Ireland's first eel factory, who invested countless hours catching them and creating an pounds 800,000 hi-tech habitat, the contents of the giant fibre-glass tanks inspire a mixture of pride and nervous anticipation.

A bold gamble by the new company, Aqua Arklow in County Wicklow, means 60 to 200 tonnes a year of smoked Irish eels could soon be dished up to consumers in Europe, and possibly Japan. Aided by Ireland's enterprising state fisheries body BIM (Bord Iascaigh Mhara), they may also appeal to the taste buds of Irish and British customers.

Catching them at just 0.3 grammes, Aqua Arklow feeds them up to 150 grammes, when they are ready for eating. Under a forward-thinking plan agreed with fisheries authorities, Aqua then returns to lakes and rivers a larger proportion of older, five- to 10-gramme specimens from its original catch than would normally survive in the wild.

The aim is to reverse, in Ireland at least, a 20-year decline in European eel numbers and give Irish fishermen larger wild adult catches than the varying river supplies would allow naturally. Until now, this had thwarted the possibility of a mass market for wild eel. It is not currently possible to breed them in captivity.

In the wild, the eel faces a 50 to 84 per cent mortality rate in its early months. Able to swim forwards and backwards, it can also breathe through its skin and smell food across extraordinary distances.

They spawn in the Caribbean's warm Sargasso Sea before migrating as glass eels to European estuaries. From pigmented "elvers", they grow into yellow then silver adults, then migrate down-river and south to complete the cycle.

Like most transatlantic voyagers they suffer stress. After the ordeal of grading at the plant they need salt or baking-powder baths to recover their equilibrium.

Catching the tiny glass eels is perhaps the hardest part of the Aqua's factory process, according to managing director Declan Duggan. Eels move only under particular tidal and weather conditions. "It might be night or day and we have to work around the tides. It's laborious; you can go for two or three trips over 200 miles without catching one. It's very hit and miss," he says.

Locals are fascinated. "They are always asking `How are the eels?' If it was trout they wouldn't be so interested. But with eels it's like snails and slugs, they're almost afraid of them," he says.

Mr Duggan, 37, used expertise he learned in industrial pipe fitting and heating to good effect. Five years in planning, the sophisticated plant features computerised oxygen and ph controls and a constant 25C water temperature.

This is essential for nurturing eels to their full 16 inches in six to 18 months, compared with six to seven years in cooler, wild conditions. (Wild eels stop feeding in cold temperatures.)

After seven days of "purging" in clear water, they are transported live for smoking on the Continent. So far not one eel has been lost to disease.