I had a student tell me something yesterday that tripped my "internet nonsense" detector. Apparently they watched some TikTok video that claimed we (the body of science) doesn't know how eels reproduce.
I did a quick Google search, found out this was nonsense and then fell into a rabbit hole of eel learning.
Apparently the video claim came from the idea that scientists had not provided concrete evidence about the spawning grounds of European eels. It was previously known that they migrate southwest passed the Azores, and suspected that they ended up in the Sargasso Sea near Bermuda and that was confirmed in the last couple of years with GPS tagging. That's a long ways to go to spawn!
Some other things I learned about eels during this
They have a catadromous lifecycle (opposite of anadromous)
Eggs hatch within a week of laying
the eggs are bouyant and fertilized in open water in some sort of mass mating
They have some unique life stages including a larval stage(leptocephalus) and a transparent glass eel stage in saltwater before returning to river to live and grow.
They are predatory and opportunistic
They can live upwards of 20 years
American eels also spawn in the Sargasso sea (do they have spatial or temporal spawning differences? Can they interbreed a la cutbows?)
Anyways, eels are cool and I learned a lot yesterday.
I did a quick Google search, found out this was nonsense and then fell into a rabbit hole of eel learning.
Apparently the video claim came from the idea that scientists had not provided concrete evidence about the spawning grounds of European eels. It was previously known that they migrate southwest passed the Azores, and suspected that they ended up in the Sargasso Sea near Bermuda and that was confirmed in the last couple of years with GPS tagging. That's a long ways to go to spawn!
Some other things I learned about eels during this
They have a catadromous lifecycle (opposite of anadromous)
Eggs hatch within a week of laying
the eggs are bouyant and fertilized in open water in some sort of mass mating
They have some unique life stages including a larval stage(leptocephalus) and a transparent glass eel stage in saltwater before returning to river to live and grow.
They are predatory and opportunistic
They can live upwards of 20 years
American eels also spawn in the Sargasso sea (do they have spatial or temporal spawning differences? Can they interbreed a la cutbows?)
Anyways, eels are cool and I learned a lot yesterday.