Regina Barber

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5,755 appearances 197 recordings 8 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard today

Regina Barber’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 129 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 33.

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Short Wave · Prepare to be baffled by what we don't know about eels · 5 Jun 2026 podcast

But still, no one knew where they went to make baby eels.

All they knew was that decades-old eels living in rivers would swim out to sea and never come back.

Over multiple sea voyages, Danish biologist Johannes Schmidt would eventually trace smaller and smaller eel larvae to the Sargasso Sea in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Then a century went by with no major breakthroughs, until the late 2010s, when scientists attached satellite tags to a couple dozen eels by a chain of Portuguese islands in the Mid-Atlantic.

When the trackers were recovered, they showed the first direct evidence that adult European eels go to the Sargasso Sea to spawn.

But to this day, no one has found a mature eel in the act of spawning in the Sargasso Sea, a 2 million square mile area.

That discovery could help explain why eel populations have declined and guide ways to raise them in captivity, which could boost eel numbers in the wild and decrease illegal trafficking.

Today on the show, the hunt for the spawning grounds of the European eel.

Plus, a look at their quirky lives and what solving this mystery would mean for the future of the species.

I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

So, Arjan, why have scientists still not found a European eel spawning in the Sargasso Sea?

That's awesome.

So the sea is big, but they are just like close to the surface, right?

So despite these eels being so mysterious, people have learned some things about them.

They are weird.

Let's talk about some of this weirdness.

What do scientists know about their life cycle?

And when they grow, that's when a lot of the differences in sex emerge, right?

Okay.

Sure.

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