David Righton

speaker

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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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.

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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

They just change the wave of swimming that they're undertaking to do that.

So they swim like a snake?

Yes, it's a particular form of swimming called anguilliform swimming.

But they also have sort of pectoral fins.

Those are the fins at the side of the body which are used for changing their sort of angle to move upwards or move downwards or break or whatever.

So they're not finless.

They have very, very tiny scales, and they do produce a lot of mucus to cover those scales, which means that they have this sort of characteristic slipperiness.

Yeah, it's one of the many unique characteristics of eel.

But coming back to this form, actually, one of the things that's worth saying is that eels exist in different forms.

So when they are in their larval phase, they don't even look like eels at all.

They're transparent.

They have very tiny heads with very pointy teeth.

They have a tiny little tail.

It is Michael Drift.

They drift through the ocean on ocean currents.

They're sort of transparent as a predator avoidance mechanism.

But this difference between the larval eel and the juvenile and the more adult forms is one of the reasons why it took such a long time to address the eel question as to where eels came from, because no one could connect where the larvae were found in the ocean and with the existence of the juvenile glass eels and then the yellow eels in rivers and streams and so on.

Well, in European eel, the larval form might last up to two or three years.

So it's another sort of unique feature, another exceptional sort of aspect to them.

So when they hatch as a larva, they're probably about six millimetres long and they might grow up to about 100 millimetres long in the course of that three-year journey.

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