The European eel is one of the most unusual fish that can only be found on our planet. Throughout their lives, they undergo so many amazing metamorphoses and overcome such distances that their feats are amazing. To start with, eels are fish that live in fresh water but breed in the ocean.
From all over the world they sail for this in the Sargasso Sea. Only hatched larvae are carried by a powerful ocean current to the shores of Europe. A long and incredibly dangerous journey lasts for three whole years.
Only off the coast of Eurasia, eels finally reach seven or eight centimeters in length, but the difficult road does not end there. Say what you like, but eels are fish that are very stubborn and consistent in their aspirations.
Having reached the rivers, they gradually rise along them to the places where their parents lived. Here they live up to 25 years, and then repeat the path of their ancestors in the Sargasso Sea. To overcome all this difficult and treacherous path, they are often forced to crawl between rivers up toa dozen kilometers!
And all this for the sake of the road of seven thousand kilometers and spawning, after which death awaits them… In a word, eels are fish that are very similar in this regard to salmon, but their migration is the opposite.
By the way, their tender and very tasty meat has been valued since ancient times. Even at the feasts of the great Alexander the Great, it was served to the most honored guests. Even then, scientists were haunted by one question: “How do these fish breed if neither caviar nor milk has ever been found in any of them?”
Then Aristotle suggested that eels are fish that originate in coastal mud!
Surprisingly, this idea of the great thinker has been a dogma for… two millennia. And only in 1694 the great Italian naturalist and naturalist Francesco Redi put forward the correct assumption.
He spent several years watching eels. Redi followed them and found out that these amazing creatures flock and swim down the rivers, heading for the seas. Indeed: all eel fish (where a large number of them are found) sometimes disappeared from some places, but no one paid any attention to these population fluctuations.
Of course, few believed him. After all, the naturalist has not provided any convincing evidence!
An indirect confirmation of the bold hypothesis was the experience of Cazzi, another Italian scientist and nobleman. Almost 200 years after Redi's theory, he caught an extremely unusual fish in the Gulf of Messina, which no one had ever seen before.described.
The "new species" was named leptocephalus. In 1897, a couple of these fish were placed in an aquarium and began to observe. A year later, an amazing discovery awaited them: the bodies of leptocephalians shortened by a centimeter, lost their specific leaf-shaped shape, turning into ordinary eels!
However, there are not only freshwater species. In particular, European sea eel fish. It grows to a length of three meters and can weigh up to 120 kilograms!
By the way, the reproduction of this species has not yet been accurately studied. Eels are known to descend to great depths to spawn. The breeding area is Gibr altar. But there are no details about the exact place of spawning, and the process itself has not yet been described by anyone.
