Slippery Slope: The Secret Life of Eels

What happened?

Oh, it's such a shame.

And it's, I, I mean, we used to work with...

We, till recently, worked with an old eel catcher.

He taught us everything he knew, and he described just what you described there.

On these sort of dark thick, thickly shrouded nights where it's just completely the sort of worst night you can imagine, when you should be in the warmth of a pub.

It's pouring down with rain, a bit stormy.

And, and on those dark nights, that's when the eels move, and he described the same thing as huge numbers going down rivers.

And I think what happened is, is a whole range of things came together at once.

We...

Eels had started to dwindle in the '80s really, and it really pushed through into the '90s and to where we are today.

But we're looking at, we're looking at a species with actually a really complex life cycle, and that's always a problem.

We tend to make it hard for species which have complex life cycles.

So it goes to sea to spawn to some mystical place that we don't really understand, you know, out in the Sargasso Sea.

Everyone knows that at school I think.

You know somewhere-

Which is where?

Deep in the Atlantic, not far from Bermuda.

Some, some massively deep, mysterious underwater place where they spawn, but we don't really understand it, and then ocean currents carry them, carrying them back.

The Gulf Stream brings them back to, to Europe and North Africa, and then they, they ride the currents.

They ride the bores sometimes up some of the rivers, and they head into fresh waters, and you're talking two or three years.

They arrive as glass eels and move up into fresh waters and become yellow eels.

And then of course, they come back as silver eels, but what a incredibly complex thing, and it takes several years.

So with such a messy life cycle and such a long life cycle, there's so much scope for it to go wrong.

So we're talking about habitat loss.