22/07/2026
It's time for the Department of Conservation and the Ministry for Primary Industries to act. Save the New Zealand longfin eel from extinction. Why does New Zealand have a commercial fishery for a species that may be going extinct? New Zealand's largest freshwater fish is disappearing. We're still exporting it.
The longfin eel — tuna, endemic to New Zealand, nowhere else on Earth — is classified "At Risk: Declining" by DOC. The IUCN calls it Endangered.
We still commercially harvest it. We still export it, some of it for pet food.
Look at the chart. Longfin landings have collapsed from 453 tonnes in 1989–90 to 21 tonnes in 2023–24. That's not a decline. That's a species falling off a cliff.
Here's the part that should worry you more than the tonnage: fishers aren't even catching their full quota.
Since South Island stocks were split by species in 2016, the longfin Total Allowable Commercial Catch has sat at levels that would allow real targeting — and fishers have caught a fraction of it, year after year. In Otago and Southland (LFE 15), the 2023–24 catch was 4.2 tonnes against a 52-tonne quota — 8%. In Westland (LFE 16), it was 0.9 tonnes against a 25-tonne quota — under 4%. That's not fishers showing restraint. That's fishers going out and not finding eels to catch.
A declining tonnage with an undercaught quota means one thing: there are far fewer eels left than the quota assumes. The number on paper still allows heavy fishing. The eels themselves are running out.
The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment called for a moratorium on longfin fishing in 2013. Twelve years on, the commercial harvest is still legal.
So why doesn't DOC step in?
Because DOC doesn't run the fishery. DOC classifies the threat. MPI — Fisheries New Zealand — sets the catch limit, under a different law, the Fisheries Act. Two agencies, two mandates, and neither one owns the whole problem. The PCE found that DOC has the legal power to write a Freshwater Fisheries Management Plan for exactly this kind of situation — and has never used it.
Longfin eels mate once, at the end of a life that can run past 100 years, in the ocean somewhere near Tonga. Every fish taken out of a river before it makes that migration doesn't get replaced next season. It's gone from the breeding population, permanently.
We wouldn't accept this for a native bird. We shouldn't accept it for our biggest, oldest, most remarkable native fish.
Source: MPI Fisheries Assessment Plenary, May 2025 (freshwater eels stock data); DOC threatened species classification; Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, "On a pathway to extinction?" (2013).
