June 8 , 2015 — Gingerly holding a slithering eel bent on escaping though the net she was holding, Rockport Middle School student Ali Schafer looked haplessly at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Biologist Eric Hutchins and made the universal face for icky.
Hutchins had collected the 11-inch American eel to show students how it compared to the juveniles, called glass eels because of their transparency, he caught earlier at his station on the school’s annual research field trip to Millbrook Pond. The eels’ life is one of mystery, he explained. They migrate from the Sargasso Sea, where they return to spawn and die, approximately 3,241 miles from Rockport.
“Years and millions of dollars of research have never definitively found where the eels spawn in the sea,” Hutchins said.
The sea is sited in the North Atlantic Gyre, a region where four currents — the Gulf Stream, the North Atlantic Current, the Canary Current, and the North Atlantic Equatorial Current — come together, carrying in a rich mix of marine plants and debris they pick up along the way.
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