I just heard that some people are not receiving their passwords when they register- meaning that comments cannot be posted. If you have registered, but not received a password…check your spam filter: the auto-email that is generated might look suspicious to your email server.
Sorry about that…I only just found out!
Later this month, the World Fisheries Congress is meeting in Japan. One of the sessions in the Congress relates to eel biology and eel management. A number of the eeliad team will be there, and we have a lot to tell the world about the work we’re doing.
More importantly though, the Congress provides an opportunity for our project to link up to other initiatives around the world, and for the development of new collaborations with researchers on other species of eel, like the giant long-finned eel or the Japanese eel. While the geographic areas are different, there is a lot of convergence in the techniques and solutions we are developing to investigate eel biology, and there are a lot of similarities between the life-history strategies of different eel species.
These possibilities really enthuse me, so I’m very disappointed that I won’t be able to attend, but I know that the other members of the eeliad team will do a great job. Good luck to them!
The eeliad project has been running for six months now. In many ways, the project is like an eel- we’re just quietly getting on with our business with no fanfares or trumpet choruses. This is pretty similar to a lot of the projects I have worked on…the start-up phase is generally quiet as we find our bearings, make sure we’re going in the right direction, and then start down the road to our goals.
I have the feeling that things are about to get a little bit busier though, because the fieldwork season is now upon us and we have two months of hard work ahead during the escapement season. It’s not just about tagging eels with fancy satellite tags…we’ll be doing a lot of sampling work to assess the quality of escaping eels to put the migratory success of different populations into context.
As soon as our work in the escapement season is done and we’re starting to digest the data we’ll have collected, we’ll be busy with the arrival of glass eels, and the fruits of our labours with genetics and otolith analysis will be starting to show. It’s going to be a really exciting time!