For almost a century, scientists have tried to understand where eels come from and how they reproduce but couldn't figure it out until now.
  • dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    28·
    3 days ago

    I wish there were a better article than this

    Here were some interesting details from wikipedia:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eel_life_history

    Because fishermen never caught anything they recognized as juvenile eels, the life cycle of the eel was long a mystery.

    In 1777, the Italian Carlo Mondini located an eel’s ovaries and demonstrated that eels are a kind of fish.[1] In 1876, a young student in Austria, Sigmund Freud, dissected hundreds of eels in search of the male sex organs. He had to concede failure in his first major published research paper, and turned to other issues in frustration.

    Larval eels — transparent, leaflike two-inch (five-cm) creatures of the open ocean — were not generally recognized as eels until 1893; instead, they were thought to be a separate species, Leptocephalus brevirostris (from the Greek leptocephalus meaning “thin- or flat-head”). In 1886, however, the French zoologist Yves Delage discovered the truth when he kept leptocephali alive in a laboratory tank in Roscoff until they matured into eels, and in 1896 Italian zoologist Giovanni Battista Grassi confirmed the finding when he observed the transformation of a leptocephalus into a round glass eel in the Mediterranean Sea. (He also observed that salt water was necessary to support the maturation process.) Although the connection between larval eels and adult eels is now well understood, the term “leptocephalus” is still used to refer to a larval eel.