EELS.

New Zealand Mail, 30 December 1892, Page 16

EELS.

Many people think, says a writer in the Australasian, that eels are thus spontaneously created, while others hold strongly to the conviction that they travel long distances overland, and thus stock newly-dug waterholes. It was a point on which there were many arguments in our village, and I am convinced that both theories were wrong. The old people generally held the travelling theory, one Irishman declared that, where he came from, the eels • kem into the meadows, an et clover like a cow.' In the British water-meadows, where the clover grows dank right down to the water's edge, the eels mayleave the water, or in flood time the subsiding waters mayleave them, but that they can go any distance over the hard wiry grass of our plains I doubt exceedingly. Yet one was often asked to explain how otherwise it happened that a tank, only a few years dug on the plains, a mile away perhaps from any other water, was stocked with eels, and the question was a puzzling one to answer then. The process of natural distribution was going on before our eyes/but we failed to notice it. Even the cows that we drove home night and morning did their share in it. Eelspawn is so remarkably fine that it looks more than anything else like a mass of fat. A cow drinking at any one of the creeks might carry some of it in the mud m her hoofs, and so stock the next pond at which she drunk or cooled herself. Wading birds, such as the blue heron, the coot, or the cormorant, flying from creek to pool, help distribution.no doubt, in the same chance fashion. Once fish are cstablisha J in a pond, water-rats find their way there in a little time. The eel is, without doubt, one of the worst enemies to fish acclimatisation, It was

a long time before we found out that the reason why English perch multiplied so slowly in our home river was that the eels cleaned off all their spawn from the waterweeds. The absence of yabbies I attribute to the same cause, and it is rather a pity tho eel will not live in northern waters, for he would soon stop the mischief that the crabs now make in boring under the weirs and floodgates of the irrigation channels.