The first three Sessions of EIFAC (1960–64) have been reported in considerable detail since it was during this time that the major organization of EIFAC was consolidated. It is not proposed however to report in detail all the activities of the Commission at its biennial sessions since 1964, but rather to now identify the achievements of the three Sub-Commissions in their specific fields. In addition, reference will be made to the reports provided by the Secretariat which concern matters not directly the responsibility of any of the Sub-Commissions.
Much of the work of the three Sub-Commissions has been accomplished through various working parties set up by them, with the approval of the Commission, for specific purposes. Working parties consist of a Convener nominated by the Commission on the recommendation of the respective Sub-Commission, a Rapporteur and selected experts, who need not be nationals of member countries. The working parties are usually small, perhaps four to eight members, depending on the nature of the subject under consideration and the breadth of knowledge required and available. It has been found useful to enlist the aid of experts from different regions, including North America, and sometimes with a knowledge of the subject literature in a variety of languages. The working parties report to the Sub-Commissions at the biennial sessions, where the future work of the working parties is planned.
The subdivision of the work of the Commission into the three fields represented by the Sub-Commissions - essentially fishery biology and management, fish culture and disease, and water pollution - has proved adequate to deal with most subjects that have been considered by the Commission, although inevitably a particular problem may be the concern of more than one Sub-Commission. For example, the discussion of the possible effects of pollution on fisheries (Sub-Commission III) highlighted the difficulty of assessing long-term effects on fish population in rivers and led to a symposium on methods for the survey of fish populations in large rivers and lakes (Sub-Commission I). However, some topics have not been appropriate for allocation to a Sub-Commission, and have been more easily dealt with by the Secretariat. Some of these have been reported upon regularly at each Session, and have been the subject of FAO reports.
For example, the synopses of biological data on the principal species of European fresh-water fishes have been the responsibility of the Secretariat, after an appropriate and willing author has been identified following suggestions by the Commission. Progress is often slow in the production of these synopses, depending largely on the amount of time which the authors are able to give to them. No recompense is given to the authors, although it has been suggested that payment of a fee might provide a stimulus. So far, nine species of freshwater fish have been covered by these synopses. Several attempts to produce a synopsis on the Atlantic salmon have failed, even with the aid of several authors, the subject perhaps being too large for this form of publication.
The Secretariat has also produced two editions of a Directory of Inland Fishery Workers in Europe (1964 and 1971) complied from forms completed by workers who wished to be included in the list. It must be admitted that only a proportion of the total number of such fishery workers is represented in the list. A directory of inland fisheries schools and training courses was produced in 1964 and revised in 1966 and 1968 but was not published.
A multilingual Glossary of Commonly Used Inland Fishery Terms was begun in 1962, and by 1968 the provisional list had been translated into Russian and Serbo-Croatian, with the intention of translation into all European languages. By 1976 the list of 1 400 terms was being further reviewed and was finally published in English and French in 1978. A Multi-lingual Catalogue of Names of Inland Water Fishes of Europe was published in 1971, after a provisional list had been prepared in 1966 for the Fourth Session of EIFAC.
The Secretariat has since 1962 prepared reports on the status of inland fisheries in Europe, relying largely on submissions from delegates and national correspondents. A report on the Organization of Inland Fisheries Administration in Europe was published as EIFAC Technical Paper (5) in 1968. As both administration and legislation are subject to change, the report was revised in 1974 and is again being brought up to date by the Secretary.
In 1963 a Newsletter was issued by the Secretariat for general distribution in the hope that regular contributions from national delegates and others would provide sufficient information to justify its regular publication. This proved unsuccessful and the Newsletter was discontinued after 1969.
The major achievements of the Commission however have been primarily due to the work of the three Sub-Commissions, their working parties, ad hoc groups and symposia on topics of major concern. The following sections of this review examine these activities, and illustrate the manner in which some subjects have developed into issues of importance, while others have proved too difficult to deal with or gained insufficient support for their continuation.
One of the first subjects to be investigated under this Sub-Commission was the technique of electric fishing in running waters to capture and remove fish. This had been stimulated by a study initiated at the First Session on the classification of fishing waters and appraisal of their fish populations. A second working paper on the subject was presented at the Second Session which recommended a series of studies on the dynamics of fish populations, beginning with those in running waters. A rapporteur for this study presented an additional paper on the subject at the Third Session in 1964. As electric fishing was considered to be one of the most effective methods of sampling fish populations, the Commission decided to convene a working party on the subject (which became the responsibility of Sub-Commission I) and to hold a symposium on electric fishing at the Fourth Session in 1966.
The working party met during the biennium and produced a preliminary report. The symposium (1966) finalized the report and recommended that it be published. The Commission also endorsed a recommendation for the standardization of terms and testing methods for both electric fishing gear and screens in the light of recommendations by a working group.
The final report of the symposium on the application of electricity to fisheries biology and management was published in both English and French with supporting documents by outside publishers by arrangement with FAO in 1968.
The second proposal, to standardize terminology and testing methods, was held up for lack of funds to convene the working party, but after a consultation on the subject was held in Poland in 1969 (at the expense of participants, where comparative field tests were also organized), a draft report was presented at the Sixth Session. This however was not adequately discussed for lack of attendance of specialists. The Commission recommended that the efforts of the working group to standardize terms, testing methods and electric fishing machines should continue. The group met in 1970 to discuss the draft report on terminology but although this was much advanced in 1974, it has not been published. The results of the comparative field tests held in Poland were published in EIFAC Occasional Paper series (6) in 1973. These were not as conclusive as originally intended.
The manner in which this subject was pursued has been described at some length, to indicate how success can be achieved with the appropriate application of sufficient specialist effort, and a willingness to work together to reach an objective; in this case, the publication of a manual on a technique of importance both to fishery scientists and managers. At the same time, attempts to produce a glossary of standard terms and to establish clear testing procedures to measure efficiency, met with less success partly due to the lack of sufficient funds to convene meetings of specialists, but probably also due to a lesser interest or lack of agreement in these aspects of the subject.
A second problem studied by Sub-Commission I concerned methods for determining the age of coarse fish. At the time (1966), ICES was beginning a similar study for salmon and trout, and the selection of coarse fish by EIFAC avoided any overlapping of effort. Ageing of fish is important both to scientists and fishery managers, and several different methods have been described in the literature. Although the subject was restricted to European inland fish species other than salmon and trout, the basic techniques would be applicable to fish in many parts of the world. The Fourth Session requested that a rapporteur prepare a report on the subject, and in the biennium the Chairman of EIFAC convened an ad hoc meeting of biologists interested in the ageing of fish during a conference in the United Kingdom.
Cooperation between scientists in several member countries encouraged the Sub-Commission in 1968 to pursue the subject. They recommended the clarification of terminology, research on physiological aspects of the criteria of ageing, development of a quantitive approach to the validation of ageing and the preparation of an atlas of scales and other structures used in ageing fish by a working party. Two years later, at the Sixth Session, a technical paper was presented entitled “Elements of the Theory of Age Determination of Fish According to Scales - The Problem of Validity”, prepared by R. Sych of Poland. Its translation into French, Spanish, German and Russian was recommended with wide distribution within and beyond the region. By 1972 it had actually been translated into French, Polish and Russian. The French and English versions were published in the EIFAC Technical Paper series (13).
The atlas of scales had not been started by the time the Seventh Session met in 1972, but EIFAC organized an international symposium on the ageing of fish in the United Kingdom in 1973, in collaboration with the Fishery Society of the British Isles and the Freshwater Biological Association, and a working party was convened immediately after that symposium to review the material received for the atlas. A second meeting of the working party was held during the Eighth Session, and in view of the progress made, the Sub-Commission recommended that the working party should continue its activities and extend its approach to include material other than scales. The initial work on the scales of roach was followed in 1976 by a draft report on bream and work on rudd was planned to follow.
This activity began slowly, but by taking advantage of opportunities presented at conferences attended by fishery biologists it was possible to gain the collaboration of scientists with particular knowledge of individual species and to acquire material necessary for at least one of the projects (the atlas of scales) put forward by the Sub-Commission. The work is of such a nature that progress will be slow but as new techniques and knowledge develop future activities of the working party should benefit from these.
A third subject which has engaged the attention of Sub-Commission I has been approached in yet another way. This concerns the economic aspects of inland fisheries. At the First Session, the Secretariat had selected the subject of the appraisal of the economic and recreational values of angling and its development, considering this to be a field of wide interest to EIFAC members. It was not, however, chosen as part of the initial work programme of the Commission. The Secretariat provided at the Second Session a résumé of some aspects of inland fisheries which could be studied from an economic point of view. At the Third Session, a partial bibliography on the economic evaluation of sport fishing and fisheries resources was presented by the Secretariat. This provoked more interest and during the Fourth Session a discussion on the general subject considered two themes, sport and commercial fishing.
In 1968, at the Fifth Session, Dr I. Norling of Sweden presented a paper on the economic aspects of sport fishing which stimulated considerable discussion and several countries expressed the view that this form of exploitation of inland fisheries attracted foreign exchange as well as being important both for recreational and food value. This paper was published as EIFAC Technical Paper (7). It was emphasized however that preliminary surveys were necessary before detailed studies to evaluate the possibilities of developing sport fishing involving considerable financial expenditure were undertaken. An Information Centre for Europe was recommended, its purpose being to assist member countries on aspects such as methodology, bibliography and making contacts with experts in the field. Research and the coordination of economic studies of sport fishing with those on commercial fisheries and other uses of water were encouraged.
The second theme, the economic evaluation of commercial fisheries, met with difficulties in its development although the Secretariat had provided documentation including proformae for collecting information on such fisheries. These had some limitations in use and no recommendations were made to develop the theme.
The Information Centre for evaluating the economics of sport fishing was set up in Sweden and sufficient interest in the subject had been generated to encourage The Netherlands to convene through EIFAC the First European Consultation on the Economic Evaluation of Sport and Commercial Fisheries in the Hague in 1972. The interest was in part stimulated by the growing awareness of the value of the environment and the increasing need for sport fishing as a recreational facility. The Seventh Session in discussing the results of the Consultation recommended that the bibliography on the economic evaluation of sport fishing by W.A. Dill be updated and published and suggested that a survey was needed to provide a standardized basis for describing the sport fisheries of the EIFAC countries.
A second European Consultation on Economic Evaluation of Sport and Commercial Fisheries was held in Sweden in 1975. Increasing interest in the subject was shown by the participation of North American representatives, which provided a further stimulus. The Ninth Session in 1976 endorsed the recommendations of the Consultation which inter alia proposed that EIFAC and FAO organize an international symposium on Inland Fishery Resource Allocation. This meeting is now scheduled to be held in Vichy, France, in 1980. It is being organized in the form of an international technical consultation with a large input from North America. The meeting will consist of five consecutive panels dealing respectively with a review of recreational fisheries, the “best use” of fishery resources, methodologies, fisheries and resource use conflicts and mechanism for international cooperation and the exchange of information.
Throughout the experience of EIFAC, a major problem confronting fishery biologists has been the assessment of fish populations in lakes and large rivers. (The sampling technique of electrofishing, which was the subject of an early study by Sub-Commission I, is generally suitable only for small rivers or streams.) Any evaluation of fishery resources requires knowledge of the types and numbers of fish available in the resources and it was also made clear during a symposium held in 1970 by Sub-Commission III on the effects of pollution on fisheries, that a degree of accuracy in measuring fish populations was necessary to quantify such effects. In consequence, a Symposium on Methodology for the Survey, Monitoring and Appraisal of Fishery Resources in Lakes and Large Rivers was held in Scotland in 1974 during the Eighth Session, and was attended by about 200 experts. The Symposium was organized into eight panels covering the objectives, techniques and the formulation of conclusions and recommendations. The panel reports and proceedings were subsequently published (EIFAC Technical Paper (23)). On the basis of the Symposium documentation, guidelines for sampling fish in freshwater were prepared for publication (Technical Paper (33), in press).
A complementary recommendation proposed an international exercise in the intercalibration of different types of fishing gear for lakes. This exercise was planned at a meeting in Hamburg in 1975 and in Helsinki in 1976. The exercise took place in selected Finnish lakes in 1976. The report was submitted to the Tenth Session in 1978 which recommended that the results be published as an EIFAC Technical Paper (34), in press. Further intercalibration work under an enlarged working group was directed to methods for sampling pelagic fish stock mainly using integrating echo-sounders. This second international intercalibration exercise is planned for September 1980 in a northern Finnish lake.
Finally, in 1974 Sub-Commission I, where the subject of eel fisheries had been discussed for several years, recommended cooperation on the subject between EIFAC and ICES. Although ICES had maintained a committee concerned with anadromous and catadromous fish for several years, this had been mainly concerned with Atlantic salmon and sea trout, and eels had been of minor interest. Nevertheless, EIFAC recognized that expertise on eels was available within the ICES Organization and proposed a symposium to be held jointly in 1976 on the occasion of the Ninth Session of EIFAC to discuss Eel Research and Management. The Symposium brought together for three days about 200 experts on eel research and management. The report was published as EIFAC Technical Paper (28) while selected papers were published in ICES Rapports et Procès-Verbaux des Réunions (Volume 174) in July 1979. The joint ICES/EIFAC Symposium recommended inter alia the organization of multinational expeditions to identify the spawning areas of the European eel. A preliminary expedition took place in 1979 to prepare for the 1981 international expedition. A joint ICES/EIFAC Working Group on Eels was also established and the group continued its work under two co-chairmen, one for each organization.
The major achievements of Sub-Commission I include: (i) publishing a manual on electric fishing, (ii) developing an awareness of the importance of the economic and social value of recreational fishing, (iii) producing guidelines on techniques for sampling fish populations in lakes and large rivers, (iv) developing ageing techniques, (v) developing a programme to compare the efficiencies of different techniques for this purpose, and (vi) encouraging joint ICES/EIFAC research on eels.
This Sub-Commission has held several symposia and workshops, mainly on fish culture. In 1966, at the Fourth Session, a symposium discussed the problems of feeding in trout culture; and at the Fifth Session, in 1968, new developments in carp and trout nutrition were the subject of a further symposium. This led directly to the convening of a Workshop on Fish Feed Technology and Nutrition as the symposium had been informed by a working party reporting on recent developments in fish food technology that there was a shortage of technologists and researchers on this subject in the EIFAC region. The Workshop was held in the United States in 1970 at the invitation of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The report of the Workshop was published by the Service as Resource Publication (102).
Another working party attempted the economic and technical appraisal of different types of fish culture with a view to formulating guidelines for development under various economic and ecological situations. This working party met twice at the Sixth Session in 1970, but was unable to hold inter-sessional meetings owing to the shortage of funds. A further meeting was held in Rome in 1972 which established the main purpose of the field to be covered, including: an assessment of the costs of producing fish in culture operations, evaluation of the return on investment, comparison of economic results both on intranational and international bases, increasing efficiency of fish farms and helping to promote new farms.
At the Eighth Session in 1974 it was agreed that more data on the economics of fish culture were required and a further group of individuals in several countries were requested to submit this information. Progress by the Ninth Session in 1976 had however been slow and the working party recommended that FAO should appoint a specialist in the economics of aquaculture to the Fisheries Department to assist EIFAC and other bodies to advance more rapidly in this field. The report of the appointed specialist, together with a draft paper on the main problems of fish culture economics prepared by the Convener of the working party, Prof M. Leopold (Poland), was submitted at the Tenth Session in 1978. It was proposed that any further action such as the organization by the Commission of a global workshop on aquaculture economics should be delayed until Prof Leopold's revised document had been fully discussed and published.
In 1970 at the Sixth Session, Prof K. Tiews (Federal Republic of Germany) was appointed Rapporteur to collect information on the institutes and agencies engaged in aquaculture and on their research programmes on fish food and feeding in order to determine the long-term programme of EIFAC in this field. A working party was appointed during the Seventh Session in 1972 to study his report, still incomplete at the time, and they recommended that member countries assist Prof Tiews in completing his survey. The countries or individual institutions were also encouraged to send to the Fishery Resources and Environment Division of the FAO Fisheries Department annual lists of publications on aquaculture so that FAO could further circulate them.
The working party noted the existence of the Cooperative Programme of Research on Aquaculture (COPRAQ) launched by GFCM and a similar programme planned for coastal aquaculture by the Indo-Pacific Fisheries Council (IPFC). They recognized the value of such cooperative efforts in advancing progress in research and identified several problems as suitable for joint or cooperative studies within the EIFAC region. These were: research on specific fish diseases, the development of cheaper feeds for trout and carp, genetic selection and hybridization of common carp, aquatic weed control and cage culture in fresh, brackish and salt waters, and in warm water effluents. A further subject, controlled reproduction and rearing of fish larvae, awaited the outcome of a workshop held in 1973 by EIFAC on Fish Breeding and Rearing Techniques. The Secretariat was asked to explore the possibility that institutions would be willing to engage in such research on any of the problems identified by the working party.
In 1974 at the Eighth Session further discussions took place, and in 1975, the First Session of the Cooperative Programme of Research in Aquaculture (COPRAQ) was held in Yugoslavia. This Session made a recommendation subsequently endorsed by the Ninth Session of EIFAC in 1976, that FAO through the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), should encourage and assist aquaculturists/pathologists in established disease laboratories and that countries in regions receiving UNDP technical assistance should allocate part of their Indicative Planning Figure (IPF) to priority fish disease research identified by COPRAQ. This programme is clearly of interest and importance to many countries within EIFAC which have such disease laboratories, and which could thus assist countries in other regions through the UNDP.
The Second Session of COPRAQ met in France in 1977 and the Third Session in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1979. Areas of possible future activity of COPRAQ have been identified as fish nutrition, controlled reproduction of cultivated fish, genetics, introduction of exotic species and new cultural techniques. With respect to the last-named topic, a symposium on new developments in the use of heated effluents and of recirculating systems for intensive aquaculture is being convened in collaboration with Sub-Commission III and in conjunction with the Eleventh Session of the Commission in 1980.
One of the fields of activity identified as of interest to COPRAQ, that of fish nutrition, was the subject of a recommendation at the Ninth Session in 1976 that a Symposium on Finfish Nutrition and Feed Technology should be held in 1978. This was duly convened prior to the Tenth Session in Hamburg with the support of ICES and the collaboration of GFCM and the International Union of Nutritional Sciences (IUNS). The meeting was attended by over 300 experts from 36 countries and a large number of technical papers were submitted. While their late availability and the wide range of topics covered made it difficult for participants to become familiar with the subject matter, the organization of the Symposium into panels, whose responsibility it was to predigest the papers and prepare subject reviews, counterbalanced their large number. Furthermore, the papers were edited and published in book form1 within a year of the Symposium thus making them available quickly for world distribution. The report of the Symposium was published as EIFAC Technical Paper (31). An outcome of the Symposium was the establishment of a working group of nutrition specialists sponsored by EIFAC, ICES and IUNS to elaborate guidelines for the standardization of experimental designs and evaluations. The report of this group is now in press in the Technical Paper series.
The other major activity of the second Sub-Commission was the organization in collaboration with the International Office of Epizootics (OIE), of a Symposium on the Major Communicable Fish Diseases in Europe and their Control held in The Netherlands in 1972. About 150 scientists and observers from 24 countries attended. The Commission at its Seventh Session accepted the report of the Symposium, recognizing the urgent need for control over international traffic in live fish and eggs, and considered that an international convention on certification was the most effective method of control. Seventeen high priority problems of research were also identified. Many of these were included in the EIFAC Cooperative Programme of Research on Aquaculture (COPRAQ) - fish diseases.
Following the decision at the Seventh Session a Government Consultation on the proposed convention was held prior to the Eighth Session in 1974 and the Director-General of FAO was asked to continue the work of formulating the draft convention and technical annexes. The majority of governments were found by 1976 to be in favour of stronger international control of fish diseases and were generally favourable to the basic concepts of the draft convention and technical annexes. In 1977, an FAO/OIE Government Consultation on an International Convention for the Control of the Spread of Major Communicable Fish Diseases was held in Paris. However, the Tenth Session in 1978 was informed that the European Community had views and comments on the proposed Convention. Until these are known, further work on the Convention will be delayed. In the meantime, however, and as a result of the FAO/OIE Consultation, OIE has amended its Zoo-sanitary Code in line with the technical annexes of the proposed Convention so that interested countries could better control the international traffic in live fish and fish eggs.
The activities of Sub-Commission II have thus been shown to be of interest to a far wider area than that of the EIFAC region. In the field of aquaculture generally many of the problems identified as of high research priority for the European region are of direct interest to countries both in the GFCM and IPFC areas and developing countries in Africa and Latin America. The proposed convention to establish a system of international control over the spread of fish diseases which was a direct consequence of the 1972 symposium held by the Sub-Commission, has the general support of most countries and is hopefully reaching fulfilment. These are the main achievements of the second Sub-Commission.
The major success of the third Sub-Commission has been the production of a series of reports on water quality criteria for inland fisheries. These reports contain critical reviews of the literature on the effects of selected pollutants on freshwater fish. They have been accepted by a number of countries and international bodies, including the European Community, as a basis on which water quality standard can be set within a regulatory framework.
The reports are produced by the working party on water quality criteria, which was established at the Second Session in 1962 and subsequently became the responsibility of Sub-Commission III when it was formed in 1964. Meetings of the Working Party are held at and between sessions. Up to December 1979, eighteen meetings had been held. Much of its work is carried out by correspondence and individual members have given a great deal of their time to surveys of literature and report drafting. Although members are coopted according to the expertise and languages required for the production of reports on specific pollutants or water quality parameters, Mr J.S. Alabaster, ably assisted by Mr R. Lloyd (both of the United Kingdom) has been the Convener throughout this period.
Up to the present time the following water quality reports have been published in the EIFAC Technical Report series: finely divided solids, water temperature (including a separate list of Slavonic literature on the subject), dissolved oxygen, extreme pH values, ammonia, zinc, copper, cadmium, monohydric phenols and chlorine. All the reports produced up to 1978 are being updated for republication in a single volume in both English and French, together with a report on fish toxicity test procedures (the subject of a separate working party described later) first published in 1975. A report on mercury is still in preparation and a report on the effects of mixtures of poisons on fish will be ready by mid 1980. The report on toxicity tests is being used by several countries and international organizations to formulate protocols for the acquisition and assessment of data on aquatic toxicology for the registration of new chemicals.
Apart from this most important field of activity, the Sub-Commission was responsible in 1968 for the assemblage of information from member countries on the most urgent problems of pollution affecting inland fisheries. This in turn led to a symposium, convened prior to the Sixth Session in Poland in 1970, to discuss the nature and extent of water pollution problems affecting inland fisheries in Europe. About sixty experts as well as observers from several non-European countries attended the meeting. The results were published in Technical Paper (16).
Among a number of recommendations which were agreed upon by the delegates was one which requested Sub-Commission I to consider the problem of developing methods whereby quantitative measurements of fish populations could be obtained in large rivers and lakes. Such measurements were already possible in small streams, but changes due to pollution (or other factors) could not be measured in the fish populations of these larger water bodies. As mentioned in an earlier section of this review, Sub-Commission I eventually held an international symposium on the general subject during the Eighth Session in 1974. This was a good example of successful collaboration between two of the sub-commissions.
Another recommendation proposed that EIFAC should coordinate European efforts to standardize fish toxicity testing procedures and terminology. Following a collaborative meeting with the State Water Authority for Baden-Wurttemburg of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1971, a working party on Toxicity Testing Procedures was established which met in 1973 and 1974. The report of the working party was published in 1975 as already mentioned (Technical Paper (24)).
Another recommendation of the 1970 Symposium was that an analysis of systems of water quality classification of rivers in Europe should be made. A report on the general subject by Dr J.M. Hellawell (United Kingdom) was discussed by the Sub-Commission in 1974 at the Eighth Session, and the Session subsequently endorsed a recommendation that a symposium be held in 1976 on the assessment of biological monitoring in relation to water quality and particularly fisheries. This symposium, convened by Sub-Commission III immediately prior to the Ninth Session in Helsinki, was attended by 109 experts. A volume containing the symposium papers was published in 19771 and subsequently a working party on biological monitoring was set up whose report was published in 1979 as EIFAC Technical Paper (32).
The main achievements of the third Sub-Commission have thus been in the: preparation of reports on water quality criteria which have worldwide applications, assessment of the major pollution problems affecting inland fisheries, and development of techniques for toxicity testing in the laboratory and assessment of pollution effects in aquatic communities. The publications for which the Sub-Commission has been responsible are listed at the end of this review, together with those from the other Sub-Commissions and the Secretariat.
