by LordRaven » Sun Aug 09, 2020 10:46 am
Stooo wrote:What's the story?
Johannes Schmidt spent 25 years chasing an enigmatic fish across the Atlantic Ocean. The Danish biologist surrendered the hunt only after his ship was torn to pieces on a Caribbean coral reef. Schmidt was trying to solve an ancient mystery about one of nature’s strangest fish: eels. Aristotle suggested the slithering species emerged spontaneously from the earth. But by the early 1900s, Schmidt and others suspected eels bred in the open ocean, instead of their lifelong freshwater homes.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet ... shing-eelsMy old dad used to love his jellied eels, disgusting mess that they are. I did used to like the mash, mutton pies and liquor though
So what is an eel? They appear to be beyond pansexual and able to change their sex at will. They are assumed to mate in the Sargasso Sea but no-one has ever observed an eel mating. I remember watching a vid of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall dragging elvers (baby eels) out of a river and bunging them in a hot frying pan before noshing down which did nothing to fuel my desire to eat the things. We know so little about this common animal.
The sargasso sea has always been in my mind the breeding ground of eels but I had no idea how that theory was arrived at --thanks!
A very interesting article that explains so much that I had no idea about, the mass orgy breeding theory for european and american eels must happen separately in the deep below the sargasso sea (as suggested) but eels in Africa and Norway having very much the same DNA and temperature tolerances is an eye opener.
I wonder if they will ever get to film the spawning, swimming all that way out into the ocean just to breed and die seems mad.
Living in freshwater growing to adulthood and then swimming thousands of miles out into the sea getting scoffed by predators all the way suggests that they breed in truly enormous numbers.
What is truly astounding when reading that is the tiny fry, either going to America or Europe, navigating using the earth's magnetism --as per the experiments mentioned. How on earth something so tiny can even swim in the right direction in a moving ocean is baffling and to be able to navigate is mind boggling --and what do they use as energy, what do they eat to go thousands of miles toward freshwater? It is truly amazing.
[quote="Stooo"]What's the story?
[quote]Johannes Schmidt spent 25 years chasing an enigmatic fish across the Atlantic Ocean. The Danish biologist surrendered the hunt only after his ship was torn to pieces on a Caribbean coral reef. Schmidt was trying to solve an ancient mystery about one of nature’s strangest fish: eels. Aristotle suggested the slithering species emerged spontaneously from the earth. But by the early 1900s, Schmidt and others suspected eels bred in the open ocean, instead of their lifelong freshwater homes.[/quote]
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/mystery-of-the-vanishing-eels
My old dad used to love his jellied eels, disgusting mess that they are. I did used to like the mash, mutton pies and liquor though :drool:
So what is an eel? They appear to be beyond pansexual and able to change their sex at will. They are assumed to mate in the Sargasso Sea but no-one has ever observed an eel mating. I remember watching a vid of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall dragging elvers (baby eels) out of a river and bunging them in a hot frying pan before noshing down which did nothing to fuel my desire to eat the things. We know so little about this common animal.[/quote]
The sargasso sea has always been in my mind the breeding ground of eels but I had no idea how that theory was arrived at --thanks!
A very interesting article that explains so much that I had no idea about, the mass orgy breeding theory for european and american eels must happen separately in the deep below the sargasso sea (as suggested) but eels in Africa and Norway having very much the same DNA and temperature tolerances is an eye opener.
I wonder if they will ever get to film the spawning, swimming all that way out into the ocean just to breed and die seems mad.
Living in freshwater growing to adulthood and then swimming thousands of miles out into the sea getting scoffed by predators all the way suggests that they breed in truly enormous numbers.
What is truly astounding when reading that is the tiny fry, either going to America or Europe, navigating using the earth's magnetism --as per the experiments mentioned. How on earth something so tiny can even swim in the right direction in a moving ocean is baffling and to be able to navigate is mind boggling --and what do they use as energy, what do they eat to go thousands of miles toward freshwater? It is truly amazing.
