The Eel

Fred Bonney · Oct 27, 2010

Just thought you may all be interested in todays article from my Guardian.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/oct/27/the-decline-of-the-eel

Ray Roberts · Oct 27, 2010

Isn't it nice to see an informative well writen article in a newspaper that doesn't slate anglers or angling. It is worrying that the cause of the decline in eel numbers is not known.

richiekelly · Oct 28, 2010

Ray Roberts said:
Isn't it nice to see an informative well writen article in a newspaper that doesn't slate anglers or angling. It is worrying that the cause of the decline in eel numbers is not known.

it certainly is

jef bertels · Oct 28, 2010

From the article:

"Two days after his very first eel pass opened on King's Sedgemoor Drain, he watched open-mouthed as CCTV footage from the previous night showed 11,000 elvers wriggling their way up through the bristles and onwards, upstream."

Can you imagine the sense of job satisfaction he got from that? He must've been buzzing.

Rickrod · Oct 28, 2010

Thanks for that Fred

geoffmaynard · Oct 28, 2010

Quote from the article:
======
"...They head downstream on the flood, and swim 3,000 miles back to the Sargasso Sea. Then they spawn, and die."

(Eels being eels, no one has actually seen this last bit happen. It's scientific conjecture, a theory first elaborated in 1922 by a dedicated Dane, Johannes Schmidt, who devoted 15 years of his life to hunting tiny, almost transparent larvae 7mm long in the mid-Atlantic. And although no one has ever found an adult eel, let alone an egg, in the Sargasso Sea, no one has yet disproved his theory either.)
=======
So are all our assumptions about eels just received wisdom then? It's just a guess? Could they just as easily come from the mid Atlantic? Or South Atlantic? I'm pretty sure Pacific eels don't come from the Sargasso. Those ones probably have a different Latin name - but a creature which can grow a set of nads as and when it likes and transform it's body so radically must be pretty hard to define as 'no relative'. Maybe one of the scientists on here can explain?

jef bertels · Oct 28, 2010

This link reveals some more of their secrets - the info about the tagging especially

BBC - Earth News - Eel reveals its migration secrets

So, we have a fish that comes to Britain from 5,000km away, lives in sea water then in fresh water, can live out of the water, can delay its puberty, can develop its nads when it wants, can swim backwards......and most amazingly for me, they can dive to 1,000 metres in the sea

This is the same fish we find in freshwater streams a few inches deep.

Yet still idiots throw them up the bank and treat them with disrespect just cos they're slimey and wriggle.

904_cannon · Oct 28, 2010

Yes, just seen it Fred. I'll have a read after the soaps

The wife was about to put it the recycling bin, she usually saves things like that.

Also saw sea angling conservation at work on the BBC Animal Rescue this morning. Tagging and releasing skate I think, I was busy taking the wifes breakfast up to her.

S-Kippy · Oct 28, 2010

Good spot Fred...very interesting and also quite worrying.

andreagrispi · Oct 28, 2010

Spent a bit of time with the DEFRA lot sorting out their health management systems.

They have done a bit of research on the eel with lots of different influencing factors - the one which stands out relates to the Gulf Stream currents or the reduction of them. The eel at that stage is so small they need the strength of the current and the raised water tempurature and water nutrient level to allow them to cross such great distances.

audi49 · Oct 30, 2010

I think the main problem with the eel research is simply the scale and variability of eel habitat, also the timescales involved within their lifecycles.

stikflote · Oct 30, 2010

ive done a fair bit of night fishing,and never yet seen a Eel going across land,, a long while ago some friends and i were discussing the same thing while out carping, none had seen this happen,

thx1138 · Oct 31, 2010

geoffmaynard said:
Quote from the article:
======
"...
So are all our assumptions about eels just received wisdom then? It's just a guess? Could they just as easily come from the mid Atlantic? Or South Atlantic? I'm pretty sure Pacific eels don't come from the Sargasso. Those ones probably have a different Latin name - but a creature which can grow a set of nads as and when it likes and transform it's body so radically must be pretty hard to define as 'no relative'. Maybe one of the scientists on here can explain?

I heard there are loads of species of eel globally, each depending on a different coastal drift pattern to complete their life cycle.

Some interesting research being done on European eels here

waggy · Oct 31, 2010

The assumed travel time, for different eel species, to assumed spawning area seems to co-relate to the fat content of silver eels as they leave a particular coastline.

John Spilsbury · Nov 1, 2010

stikflote said:
ive done a fair bit of night fishing,and never yet seen a Eel going across land,, a long while ago some friends and i were discussing the same thing while out carping, none had seen this happen,

Me neither, yet I have often wondered whether this be true. All I know is that the first eel I ever caught I dropped because of the unexpected slipperiness. And it then slithered backwards, and completely inextricably into thick grass. Proving that they CAN move across land, and that they had little interest in whether I won the match.

The Eel

Fred Bonney

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Ray Roberts

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richiekelly

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jef bertels

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Rickrod

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geoffmaynard

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jef bertels

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