Quote from the article:
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"...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.)
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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?