Download FAR 2019/06 Site-specific selectivity of electric-fishing gear

We used 3 years of electric-fishing catch data from 3 Canterbury Rivers to explore capture-efficiency of shortfin and longfin eels. If stop nets were not used during multi-pass electric-fishing surveys, eel abundance was underestimated by 3–40%. Capture-efficiency increased strongly with increasing eel size. Elvers will be underestimated relative to large eels in electric-fishing surveys that do not use stop-nets and only conduct a single pass.