Jimmy Allingham

Because this lake, it's surrounded by farmland and forestry and it's not easily accessible from the road.

To get there, you sort of drive to the end of a country road and then you can either take a four-wheel drive track or my little work car wasn't going to do that, so I had to walk in quite a way.

So we don't know that.

We did, when I was there, we did find a couple of

dead eels that had been moved into other waterways and drains around there but we just don't know the numbers of that at this stage but as long as those eels were in relatively good health and it's quite amazing the ones the couple that I saw that got rescued they're pulled out of the mud and they look all dry and covered in mud but once the iwi volunteers

washed some of that mud off and put them in buckets of water, they started moving around again and looking a bit better.

One concern is that they might have lost their layer of slime on the outside of the eels, which does protect them because many of the eels have been found stuck together, sometimes a live one stuck to a dead one.

So that's a cause for concern.

The ones I saw anyway were all different lengths, and tuna or eels, they grow something, I think it's at least 15 or 20-something centimetres a year, so you can work out based on how big they are, how old they are.

But the ones I saw lying in the puddles...

on the dried up lake bed by the time I got there.

There were small ones, there were larger ones.

It just looked like they were of all ages and that's concerned local iwi members.

Justin Tamihana telling me concerned about the multi-generational loss because he'd seen relatively baby eels plus big long ones which clearly indicated age.

So that is of concern, the fact that some of them might be quite old but also we're losing the younger population as well.

I think it's just too soon to know.

And at the moment, we don't have a precise count, say, of how many have died.

We know that there were 3,000 rescued, about 3,000, the iwi say, but we don't know how many have died there.

And also, as you alluded to before, we don't know how many of those 3,000 that were rescued have survived.

But that surely will be something that will be looked at and potentially restarting the zeal population in Pukipuki Lagoon.