David Righton: The long slow road: tracking European eels across the Atlantic ocean
Channel: Fishbase Sweden
Date: 08/11/2023

David Righton, CEFAS, UK, gave a lecture on "The long slow road: tracking European eels across the Atlantic ocean" at FishBase Symposium 2023 in Stockholm, Sweden, October 16, 2023.

ABSTRACT: Exactly a century ago, the Danish biologist Johannes Schmidt demonstrated that eels reproduced in the Sargasso Sea, ending two millennia of speculation over how and where eels reproduced. Schmidt’s published work was based on surveys for larval eels, but despite his great efforts at the time and afterwards, he was not able to find any spawning adult eels. 
In the century since, much time and effort has been invested in ocean surveys to do so, with no success. In recent years however, the development of electronic tracking technology has permitted scientists to look at the problem in a different way: rather than search the expanse of the Sargasso Sea for spawning eels, they can now tag and track eels as they make their journey across the Atlantic to spawn. 
In this talk, I will discuss the development of methods for tracking European eels in the marine environment, and how the study of eel behaviour in the marine environment has developed from, at first, tracking eels for a few hours or days over a few km, to more recent studies that have tracked eels for several months over thousands of km, including all the way to the Sargasso Sea.