EELS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume II, Issue 281, 24 September 1889, Page 4

EELS.

. : — ♦— Vntil within recent years there has been very little known of the habit* of the eel,, how or .where they were born, or anything relating to them. It is, within ,the last, dozen years or so that the' Russian naturalist, > v yrski, has t roved that they are egg pro luoing, but no one has discovered where the eggs Are laid, or anything relating to their hatching. Eels leave the freshwater and go into salt about October, and the fry T4turns to the brooks and rivers in swarms in the spring. It was left to Mr Fred Mathei, the > wellknown American fish culturist, to estimate the number of eggs in an eel. He ( credits the ovaries (known •to fisherman as cc fat) with fully 9,00(^,000 §ggs. Tinder the u4cro sctfßpe *Bhfi>u_td tl»i'the^xtf-aotir©* ( y eigh*ty tb'th'e line^l'nchrafld' 'tal*; M ing one overy and dividing it by means oi the most delicate scales known to science, he halved, quartered, and further divided the mass seventeen times, until he had a section sma'l enough to count the eggs in it. This section represented Iby 131,072 of the total nu nber, and three sections were laboriously fc unted under the microscope. One ' of the sections contained 68 eggs, ( making the total 8,912,896 eggs. . The se- ond held 77 eggs, or 10,092---544 ia th- whole. The third sec- '• ction consisted of 71, from which it would appear that there were 9,306,112 eggs in the eel. Taking the last, as the medium number, Mr Mather's figures, i-i round numbers, , *that a six pound eel contained 9,000,000 eggs. The young fry are like bits of thread *, and form fine food for trout.