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There are round 15 species of eels within the Anguillidae household, all of them lengthy, snake-shaped fish and most of them migrating between the ocean and freshwaters inland throughout totally different components of their lives.
Essentially the most outstanding journey is made by the European eel, (Anguilla anguillla). Born within the Sargasso Sea, within the central Atlantic, they hatch into clear larvae that appear to be leaves with tiny fish heads caught on. They drift for hundreds of miles on Atlantic currents and arrive on the shores of jap Europe the place they rework into bootlace-sized younger, often known as glass eels or elvers.
They mature in shallow coastal seas and finally change color to turn out to be bigger yellow eels earlier than migrating alongside rivers and into lakes. For many years, eels keep in inland freshwaters, earlier than altering color once more to turn out to be metre-long silver eels.
Silver eels are the ultimate life stage and have the intrepid process of retracing their paths from a long time earlier, and swimming all the way in which again to the Sargasso Sea. It’s solely after they strategy the spawning waters that men and women mature and their sexual organs develop.
For years, the epic life cycle of European eels remained an unproven principle. It was solely in 2022 that scientists tracked silver eels to their spawning grounds, the place the females launch hundreds of thousands of eggs which are externally fertilised by the male eels.
The subsequent massive query is what the longer term will maintain for eels. The variety of glass eels arriving at European coasts has plummeted by greater than 95 per cent in recent times, and the species is very endangered. They face many issues, together with dams blocking their migration routes and unlawful buying and selling of glass eels to rear in fish farms.
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