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

So it is critically endangered, but there are management plans in place.

The difficulty is for the eel recovery plan, the eel management plan, is that eels are so long-lived, their generation time is so long.

that actually it will take quite a long time for that plan to come into action.

So the people who are designing the plan and putting the plan into action may not actually be around to see the recovery of the eel stocks to their former high levels, but there are some encouraging signs.

Yeah, so there's been a number of different phases of technology, really, that's helped that.

And the very early work was done with tags that would make a little sound, a little ping, what we call acoustic tags.

And people would track eels that were tagged with an acoustic tag, and they would have a hydrophone at the sea surface.

They'd let the eel go, and they would try and track the eel.

As you follow it.

So basically follow it in a boat.

You'd have a couple of operators on the boat listening for the ping of the tag.

And then they would navigate and maneuver the boat to follow the eel, sometimes for days.

I think the longest track is about a week long, a few tens of kilometers.

But that technology obviously has its limits.

Well, I do have some ideas about how that could be possible, but getting back to the... Oh, if you can... No, no, no, no, no.

Well, what we do now is we use a type of tag called an archival tag.

That's a tag that records the environment the eel is in, the depth and the temperature and the light.

And those data are stored within an internal memory in the tag.

And then after a particular period of time, some six months or a year, that tag is then released from the eel and the data can be transmitted to us by satellite.

So communicated through satellite and then beamed down into our laboratories and so on.

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