ROMANCE OF THE EEL.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18565, 24 November 1923, Page 7 (Supplement)

ROMANCE OF THE EEL.

SECRET OF SEA SOLVED.

REMARKABLE DISCOVERY.

For years geologists have been trying to discover where the eel spawns and •where the young eels spend their earliest infancy before reaching the streams and ponds" in which they ar* usually found. All that could be said with certainty was Ihat the breeding places "were not in fresh water, but somewhere in llie ocean depths. One day last year, Dr. Johannes Schmidt, a Danish professor, set out in a specially-equipped trawler, determined not to return 'until he had. located the eel's birthplace. By dredging the seabottom at frequent intervals during the voyage, Dr. Schmidt succeeded in tracing thfe eel to an area slightly north-east of the Bermudas. Here he found the eel s eggs, and with them millions of young eelstiny, transparent, sole-shaped fish, with needle-point teeth. From his investigations he pieced together one of the most amazing romances in Nature. Almost as soon as it is born the liny British eel, scarcely thicker than a bit of paper, begins its pilgrimage of 3000 miles across the . Atlantic Ocean. The joilmey occupies two years, and is carried out with the assistance of the Gulf Stream, which, in conjunction with the eel's wonderful instinct, guides it to the coasts of Europe. • When this stage of the journey is reached the little eel stops feeding, while one by one its teeth loosen and fall out. Further, it gradually assumes a new shape, its roundness becoming more pronounced as the weeks pass by. _ Toward the beginning of the second winter the voung eel has grown up in the likeness of its parents. Now begins the great trek up the ri'vers and streams. This part of the eel's history often involves a journey of many miles overland, the same wonderful instinct that guided the creature across the far-flung sea prompting it to wriggle tip hill and down dale, until it reaches the waters .where it will spend the next seven or eight years. - . Ai the end of this period the eel beoomes restless. It discards its greygreen garb for a livery of shining silver, while its movements become almost electric. This- change of . habit and appearance presages the return ,of the eel to its native'deep. Setting its course downstream, it malces for the sea, whence it aoeee its way with all haste to the breed-ing-ground it left years before. From this second great adventure of its life the eel never returns. Having found again the dim, weedy depths where it was born, away off the east coast of Central America, it brings into being the nixt generation of eels, and then dies.