The Long Way Home...

Nowadays, eels are so familiar as to seem almost commonplace, but for a very long time, the secrets of their lives were unknown and steeped in mystery as no-one knew quite where they really came from. Because fishermen would never catch anything that they recognised as juvenile or baby eels, speculations and old wives’ tales grew rife about where they came from.

Aristotle himself had some theories on their natural history, postulating that they were “born of earthworms” which themselves were spontaneously generated from mud. It wasn’t until 1777 that an Italian scientist conclusively established that eels were even fish. A hundred years later, a young Austrian student by the name of Sigmund Freud dissected hundreds of male eels in an effort to locate their sex organs before finally giving up in frustration and turning his attention to psychology.

It’s unsurprising that the truth evaded people for so long, as eels actually spawn in the Sargasso Sea, just south of Bermuda and many thousands of miles away from where they’re normally encountered. Once spawned, the flat, transparent larval eels (known as Leptocephalus or “slim head”) travel right across the Atlantic, often taking as long as three years to reach the coasts of Europe and slowly growing as they go. Once there, they enter estuaries and migrate up rivers and streams to live in freshwater during their juvenile growth phase.

After 10 to 14 years, they have fully matured and migrate back towards the sea to spawn. So strong is their instinct that they even propel themselves across wet grasslands and dig through wet sand to reach the open water. However their bodies continue to change as they go and by the time they reach the sea, their gut dissolves making feeding impossible and forcing them to survive only on the energy they already have stored. Just how adult eels make the 4,000-mile odyssey across the ocean and back to their spawning grounds remains unknown…