October 27, 2015 — It’s a mystery that has puzzled scientists for a century — how swarms of baby eels appear in the Sargasso Sea near Bermuda when adults have only been found in faraway places like Canada’s St. Lawrence River.
For the first time, Canadian researchers have tracked an adult female eel from Nova Scotia all the way to the northern edge of the Sargasso Sea with a satellite tracker — a 45-day journey of about 2,400 kilometres, described in a new paper published today in Nature Communications.
If they can confirm the path taken by that eel is the typical migration route used by Canadian eels, that may help scientists figure out measures that could be taken to conserve the endangered fish.
American eels, known by the scientific name Anguilla rostrata, are found in watersheds from Venezuela in the south to Greenland in the north, says Julian Dodson, a University of Laval researcher who co-authored the new paper.
In Canada, they historically lived throughout the St. Lawrence Seaway and Great Lakes, although their populations have fallen dramatically in the past 20 years, largely because of fishing and hydroelectric dams that they have trouble crossing.
Males typically live further south than females.