THE MYSTERIOUS EEL.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXV, Issue 4783, 1 December 1924, Page 2

THE MYSTERIOUS EEL.

ITS LIFE HISTORY. KNOWLEDGE OF LAST FEW YEARS All fishermen know the dusky oUvegreen eel abolt half a foot in length that may be caught lurking beneath any old wooden piles or the riverbank, but it is only in the last few years that its life history has been discovered (says E. H. P. in the “Daily New’s”). Till 1804 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 of two worlds, the old and the new, breed at the bottom of the West Atlantic. At first they are infinitesimally 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 ell generally has about fifteen million little brothers and 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 fishermen know so well are generally four-year-olds cn their way up-stream. Instinctively the eel moves inland, eating voraciously all the way roots, snails, beetles, and smaller fish. It is when he has grown big, with a rich covering of fat to protect him on his long return journey across the Atlantic, that man starts to catch him in earnest. During his time up-stream he has been making overland excursions, wriggling through the grass for miles perhaps in search of some pleasant pond where his ravages among moorhens and carefully preserved flsn bring fury and despair to the owner. For nearly fifteen years the eel lives inland, the female growing i.o as much as 6ft, and their skin takes 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 tor food ; it intends to perform the journey in a year. And, in spite of eel-spears, 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-ser-pent—who knows ? But at any rate his life history is stranger than any Action that the ancients made no about him I I