December 7, 2015 — Eels hold tight to their biological secrets, so much so that Aristotle mused that they must be sexless creatures spontaneously emerging from the “earth’s guts.” Now, at least one eel enigma is finally a step closer to being solved.
For the first time, scientists have tracked American eels migrating to their legendary spawning grounds in the Atlantic Ocean.
“For a very long time, circumstantial evidence has pointed to the Sargasso Sea as the breeding grounds of eels, but like crime novel detectives, scientists have wanted conclusive proof,” said David Cairns, a research scientist at Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans, who was not involved in the work.
The search for that proof, he added, “has preoccupied eel scientists for more than a century.”
American eels spend their adult lives, which range from three to 20 years, in rivers and estuaries from Greenland to Venezuela, but those far-flung populations share a single reproductive site in the Sargasso Sea. Their migration to the sea is perhaps one of the most impressive animal journeys in the world, but no one has ever caught an adult in the open ocean — much less observed them reproducing.
Read the full story at the New York Times