THEY are slimy, look like snakes and live under rocks. They bite. No wonder eels are unloved. But 25,000 people are employed in the eel fishing industry in Europe alone. And eels fascinate biologists, who have never discovered exactly where they breed. Their secret may soon be safe forever, for it seems the eel could be about to disappear.
Willem Dekker of the Netherlands Institute for Fisheries Research in Ijmuiden says that the population of European eels (Anguilla anguilla) is now just 1 per cent of what it was in 1980. Its American cousins (Anguilla rostrata) are doing little…
