Jimmy Allingham

And that report that I found is almost a decade old now.

Well, it could do.

And the weather pattern in Manawatu over summer has been quite unusual, to say the least.

It was a very, very wet summer.

And into February, there were the storms that came through then, so it was quite wet.

Then all of a sudden in March, it just dried out.

There was very little rain at all, and the temperatures went up, the sort of temperatures you might have previously seen over those high summer months.

So potentially it has played a part there.

And if what Horizons officials are saying is true, that other waterways have lower levels of water, and that's what their monitoring indicates, potentially that could have played a part in this.

Well, they are amazing creatures, aren't they?

And they are a sacred species to Māori.

But there's still a lot of mystery about them too, isn't it?

We don't actually know exactly where they spawn in the Pacific Ocean.

I think we understand that it's somewhere near Tonga.

But there's that mystery to it and the fact that they live so long.

Females might live up to 90 or 100 and then go and spawn, after which they die.

But the larvae sort of turns into a small eel and it starts out again.

Their lifespan has to be something that fascinates us because you think of fish and most creatures in the sea and you just think they only live a few years, but these things can outlast us, can't they?

And they're quite amazing.

I think they can climb up dams at times and up waterfalls.