eeliad blog

We recently held a meeting to review the information we’ve received from satellite tagged eels.  It’s very exciting to get data back from eels that we last saw many months ago.  We get all sorts of information from the satellite tags- direction of migration, migration speed, the depths and temperatures chosen by the eels as they swim through the ocean and, by comparing the information we have on tings like eel lenght or fat content, whether some types of eels are more successful at swimming towards their spawning grounds.

It’s still early days yet, and there are ups and downs yet to come, but we’ve already tracked eels farther than they’ve ever been tracked before and discovered a few more secrets about eel behaviour.  The coming weeks and months will provide even more data, and uncover a few more mysteries I am sure!

I spent today at the World Conservation Monitoring Centre (http://www.unep-wcmc.org/) in Cambridge.  The WCMC does what it says in the name- and the variety and scope of their work is very impressive.  Especially exciting is the way that they are developing new mapping techniques that can display and communicate complex data in simple ways. 

It was a very thought provoking meeting, so much so that I was too busy thinking about future opportunities to take the right turning off the motorway on the way home!

Eels are mysterious creatures.  They are other worldly too…you can understand why Aristotle thought that they came from ‘the guts of the earth’.  But how old can an eel get?  Sometimes, I hear reports that European eels can live to 90 years old or more.  For a long-finned eel, found in New Zealand, female eels are 85 years old on average…that’s just incredible. 

Ageing of fish is a really important.  It helps us to estimate growth rates, understand population structure and, over time, helps us understand how these things may be changing.  Cemagref in Bordeaux, France, is hosting a four-day eel ageing workshop in April. The aim is to standardise techniques across Europe, and to develop techniques to age eels.  It’s not yet an exact science, and there are still many debates about how best to do it.  Better estimates of the age of glass eels and elvers will help us find out how long it takes for larval eels to reach Europe from the spawning grounds.  Good luck to all those taking part next month!

Nature is red in tooth and claw.  Many of the eels we released last year will not have made it to the spawning grounds in time for spawning this month and next month.  We’ll find out just how many did make it, or how many didn’t make it, over the next few weeks as the results of our satellite tagging work start to come through.  But Nature is cruel, and our chances of success are slim because many eels could have been eaten, run out of energy, got lost on their journey, and some may even have decided that migration to the Sargasso Sea is not for them.

When we collect our results together, we hope that they will get published in a journal like Nature or Science.  They certainly deserve the attention…no-one else has followed eels as far as we have.  But like mother Nature, the journal Nature can be cruel too.  Here’s hoping!

I aim to write, on average, a post a week.  Clearly, that hasn’t been happening!  Is it because there is nothing to write about?  Not at all- there is so much going on in the project it is hard to keep track of.  Some of the stuff I can’t blog about yet, because we’re gettting results that are going to be very high-profile and I can’t compromise their publication by blogging about them.

But the honest reason is that blogging about eeliad is a low priority at the moment-so I can’t find time for it.  As the year goes on, and the pressure relents a bit, I hope I will be able to achieve my aim of one post a week.  It will certainly be a lot easier when the required annual report to the EU is out of the way…and that will provide me with a lot of material to write about!