Seasonal Migrants and Traditional Ecological Knowledge in a Region of Risk: The Pulse Seine Fisheries in Limfjorden, Denmark, c.1740–1860

This article presents the commercial scale and organisation of the Danish pulse seine eel fishery in the Limfjord before the advent of modern offshore fisheries. Partly due to environmental concerns, the pulse seine fishery was tightly regulated, with every seine having to be checked and certified by the local district bailiffs. Here, we present the first in-depth analysis of all preserved certificates for eighteenth- to nineteenth-century pulse seines, totalling over 2,100, and then combine this data with a demographic and a GIS-based database. We profile the typical fishermen as migrant or resident in the Limfjord, and we suggest the overall conditions that led eels to be in decline. The migrant fishermen came from only a select few impoverished settlements in the dunes next to the North Sea, and over a hundred-year period of study, we document a gradual shift towards pulse seine fisheries by resident Limfjord fishermen and farmers.