David Righton

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154 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2025 last heard 26 Nov

David Righton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Infinite Monkey Cage · What’s the deal with eels? – Lucy Porter, David Righton and Caroline Durif · 26 Nov 2025 podcast

I'm David Wrighton, and I'm a scientist at the UK Center for Environment, Fisheries, and Agriculture Science.

I've been studying European eels for nearly 20 years, including tracking them across the Atlantic to the Azores and beyond.

And one of my most memorable journeys

was going for a short walk on a misty Welsh mountainside with my children and turning that into quite a long and lost walk, emerging from the mist a couple of hours later than originally intended, and I've never been so glad to see a pay-and-display car park.

Yeah, well, the name of the eels is anguilliformes, which is not really very helpful because it means something in the shape of an eel.

So that's probably a bad place to start.

But there are hundreds of species of eels, many of which remain within the marine environment all the time.

You'd think of things like moray eels or conger eels, or perhaps if any of you scuba dived, you might have seen some things called garden eels and that sort of thing.

But the anguillid eels, which we're talking about today, are those that are also called freshwater eels, and there are about 20 species of those.

If you were to try and go back and find a common ancestor with us, you'd need to go back about 500 million years, something like that, to what would be a jawless fish, a very primitive fish similar to the hagfish.

So that would be our common ancestor from all those years ago.

But the anguillid eels that we're talking about are relatively recent in that context.

They emerged only about 50 to 70 million years ago.

And the European eel, which Caroline and I both study, emerged even more recently than that, probably about three to five million years ago.

Well, the biggest anguillid eel is the mottled eel, which can reach about 200 centimetres in length, two metres, and weigh up to about eight kilograms in weight.

So that's quite a sizeable individual.

Well, they do have fins.

They have a long fin all along the top of their body, which joins the tail and then comes around under the belly.

So they have this fin all the way along the top and along the bottom.

And that actually enables them to swim backwards as well as forwards.

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