Beautiful and mysterious Eels
Saturday, February 16th, 2008
…An even more remarkable migration is that of the eels. Each autumn these fish leave European rivers and head across the Atlantic to converge upon a small area in the Sargasso Sea near Bermuda. There they spawn and die. When their eggs hatch, they are caught up by the Gulf Stream and, in a journey that takes three years, float round the great wheeling North Atlantic current to the coast of Europe. Only then developing into young elvers, they make their way up-river to adult life in fresh waters. Ten years later it is the turn these fish, having reached the appointed hour in their lives, to head down-stream and out through the ocean to the Sargasso Sea. What inborn clock starts them, what inborn compass guides them, remains at the moment beyond comprehension.
It is all the more puzzling that other eels which seem identical with the European eels arrive off Bermuda from America to spawn, and in due course their offspring, which appear quite similar to the European eel larvae somehow find their way after a mere six months’ journey in the Gulf Stream to American rivers. The migration of the eels remains a most mysterious series of exits and entrances in the great theatre of life and death in the sea.
found in ‘The Sea’, LIFE Natural Library, (1969)
What is not such a mystery is, that meanwhile the eel is a very endangered species since baby-eels (elvers) serve the human being as delicacy….
