ABSTRACT

Schmidt (1922) discovered that the spawning area for both the European eel Anguilla anguilla and the American eel Anguilla rostrata is located far offshore in the Sargasso Sea of the Atlantic Ocean thousands of kilometers from their growth habitats in Europe and North America, indicating that these two species of Atlantic freshwater eels make remarkably long spawning migrations. The European eel is widely distributed in North Africa and Europe. It has a longer larval period as compared to other anguillid eels (Arai et al. 2001a). More recently, the spawning area of the Japanese eel, Anguilla japonica, was discovered far offshore in the Philippine Sea of the western North Pacifi c (Tsukamoto 1992) where all of the oceanic stages of this species were fi rst collected, including spawning adults, eggs, and recently hatched larvae (Tsukamoto et al. 2011). The Japanese eel spawns in summer, with juvenile recruits being transported back to the coasts of northeastern Asian countries in winter. Eel species in both the Atlantic and Pacifi c spawn in similar westward-fl owing currents at the southern edges of the subtropical gyres in both oceans; therefore, their larvae (leptocephali) can be passively transported to coastal areas. The long migrations to these spawning areas have fascinated scientists because each eel must migrate thousands of kilometers back to the same area to spawn. The discoveries of the spawning areas of temperate eels

Environmental and Life Sciences Programme, Faculty of Science, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Jalan Tungku Link, Gadong, BE 1410, Brunei Darussalam.