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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Appearances
across the Atlantic.
And then they metamorphose into what are called glass eels.
So that's a tiny replica of an eel, but transparent.
And they migrate in their hundreds and thousands and millions up to the coast and then populate coastlines, estuaries and streams and rivers.
It's a matter of days, isn't it, I think, Caroline?
It was an accidental discovery.
Yeah, at its maximum, it would be 8,000 kilometres or so from the easternmost point at which eels are found.
The obvious question is how?
Well, yeah, that's one of the things that people have been trying to work out for a long time, ever since the Danish scientist Johan Schmidt discovered that the spawning area was in the Sargasso Sea.
And that journey across the Atlantic Ocean is something that's motivated generations of scientists, possibly since Aristotle.
you know, including myself and Caroline, to try and understand a little bit more about that and how they do it.
Because they must transform into this final version of an eel in this part of their life cycle.
They start as a leptocephalus.
They turn into a glass eel.
They then become elvers and then yellow eels, which is where they spend the majority of their lives, which can be decades long in the case of the European eel.
The oldest ever recorded was about 90 years old.
Wow.
But the sort of average age of eels in the UK is probably sort of 15 or so, or perhaps a little bit even higher than that.
But silver eels are the migratory form, so-called because of their silvery belly, but they also have a dark upper side, the dorsal side.
And they have special adaptations for migrating across those ocean distances.
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