What has happened to our tagged eels?
Thursday, May 14th, 2009It’s been a few months since we released eels with tags attached or implanted. According to perceived wisdom, they should be arriving at the Sargasso Sea and spawning right about now. So are they?
So far, we’ve heard from a significant proportion of the pop-off tags we deployed, and only a couple of the implanted tags. These are the tags from eels that didn’t make it all the way to the Sargasso and from eels that only made a short journey before the tags were released.
We’re still waiting for a lot of data to be returned. It is frustrating because we want to know what is happening, but these kinds of studies take a long time to come to fruition. Often, the most important data are the data that are returned at the very end of the data collection period. We won’t be able to assess the success of our tagging, at least in a preliminary way, until the start of the 2009 tagging season in October. Keep checking back for updates!