THE MYSTERIOUS EEL.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 18233, 18 November 1924, Page 4

THE MYSTERIOUS EEL.

All fishermen know the dusky olive-

green csl aboiit Half a foot in length, that may be caught lurking beneath any old wooden piles or tfie river bank, but it is only in the last few years that

its life-history has been discovered (says E.H.P. in the London "Daily News"). Till 180-4, no one had found a baby eel, but in that year one was discovered off the Faroe Islands, and the chase grew hotter. Science has now discovered that the -eels o£ two worlds, the old and the new, breea at the bottom oi

the West Atlantic. . . n1 At first they are infimtesimally small, shaped like a laurel leaf, and capable of resisting great pressure; but on their journey across the Atlantic they grow rapidly and gradually rise to the surface. Thousands a minute fall victim to some marauder, but an eel generally has about fifteen million little brothers ,rtid sisters, so that a lot of marauding is needed to thin out appreciably that

solid moving mass. It takes three years for our eels to reach us, and those that fistertoenknow so well are generally four-year-olds on

their way up-stream. Instinctively the eel moves inland, eating voraciously all the way roots, snails, beetles, and smaller fish. It js when he has grown big, with a. rich covering of fat to protect him on his long return journey across the Atlanman. starts to catch him in

earnest. , ■_ DurinpC His tinio iip-stre&in ft© n&s been making overland excursions, wriggling through the grass for miles per* naps in search of some pleasant pond where his ravages among . moorhens ana carefully preserved fish bring fury and

despair to the owner. , For nearly fifteen years the eel lives inland, the female growing to as mueh as 6ft, and tlieir skins take on the greyish, silvery hue that we see in fishmongers' shops. Then suddenly, one autumn, its all-devouring appetite becomes intermittent; like a flash it is off to the sea on its long journey across the Atlantic, there to breed and die. Once the sea is reached there is no stop for food; it intends to perform the journey in a year. And in spite of eelspears, eel-weirs, and traps of every sort, the wonderful life-force of the eel makes him very difficult to catch. His great Atlantic journey accomplished, he vanishes utterly from our ken. Perhaps he becomes a sea-eer-. pent—who knowsf But at any his life history is stranger than any fictions that the ancients made up about him J