A regional fishery body is seeking to reduce cormorant numbers across Europe through “coordinated” culling, citing the aquatic birds’ reported impacts on fisheries and aquaculture.
The European Inland Fisheries and Aquaculture Advisory Commission (EIFAAC), a body under the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the U.N., published its draft plan on April 25. The proposal notes that the great cormorants’ (Phalacrocorax carbo) increasing population and expanding range in Europe have caused a decline in fish stocks and loss in aquaculture production in both fresh and coastal waters, causing economic losses.
Conservation group BirdLife International called the proposed pan-European culling of cormorants “a dangerous precedent for human-wildlife conflict management.”
“Culling native species because we perceive them as competitors is a slippery slope, which could easily be applied to other animals — predators like seals are already under attack for allegedly eating too many fish,” Marion Bessol of BirdLife Europe & Central Asia told Mongabay by email.
Bessol said that while BirdLife acknowledges studies showing cormorants’ impacts on certain fish populations, those studies document local effects that cannot be generalized to justify culling of cormorants across Europe. She added that the draft plan’s proposed management measures, including the annual culling of 150,000 adult cormorants or the destruction of 50% of eggs, are “arbitrary targets.”
“Overfishing, habitat loss, river damming, pollution, and eutrophication have pushed many fish species to the brink of collapse. These systemic issues, caused by human activities, require long-term policy solutions, not the culling of a native species,” BirdLife said in its statement.
EIFAAC Secretary Raymon van Anrooy told Mongabay by email that BirdLife data shows great cormorant breeding pair numbers in Europe have increased from some 15,000 in the 1970s to 414,000-515,000 in 2021.
By extrapolating these figures, EIFAAC estimates a population of more than 1.5 million great cormorants in Europe, van Anrooy said. Each cormorant consumes some 180 kilograms (397 pounds) of fish yearly, meaning the entire population eats 270 million kg (596 million lbs) of fish annually, “equivalent to fish consumption of 12 million people in Europe.”
Bessol said this estimate is “simplistic,” since not all the fish eaten by cormorants would’ve been caught by fisheries. Moreover, cormorants, on average, eat small fish, other small wildlife and invasive fish species of no commercial interest to people, she said.
Richard King, researcher and author of the book The Devil’s Cormorant, told Mongabay by email, “The misguided blaming of cormorants for the decline in fisheries goes back centuries. The birds are particularly demonized across Europe and North America,” he said, citing the Bible, Shakespeare and observations about the species’ dark color and the bird’s ability to swallow large fish.
Anrooy said the EIFAAC will continue its discussions with stakeholders, including BirdLife and other conservation groups. It aims to submit the draft to the European Commission by October 2025 and have its possible endorsement by May 2026.
Banner image of a great cormorant by Alexis Louis via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).
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