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On May 16, the Public security bureau in Hangzhou, China, revealed a case of illegal fishing of baby eel that attracted wide attention online.
From February to May this year, 39 criminals caught a large number of baby eel on the Qiantang River, and seized a total of more than 2,000 baby eel. As we all know, 5cm eel seedlings have been sold at 50 yuan per piece in the market, the price can be comparable to gold, the most important thing is that it may not be available!
The fishing ban on the Qiantang River is from March 1 to June 30, during which fishing in any way is strictly prohibited. However, some people choose the baby eel at night, from 1 am to 4 am, lasting three hours.
However, because the eel seedling is not good at swimming, it needs to take advantage of the tidal flood migration, and the night high tide time is uncertain, so the poachers sometimes move early, sometimes move late.
Unfortunately, the net, which is only 3.8mm in size, almost kills all fish and shrimp covered in the water. That's not all! Now, there is a "large mesh, high density" method, can also achieve the above goal. This method is called light trapping. Lamplight traps are often used by poachers to concentrate eels in blue light and then work frantically in white light to catch dozens or hundreds of eels in a net after several rounds.
In general, the higher the tide, the stronger the current, the more baby eel are brought ashore. In order to catch more baby eel, people even run 100 meters from the shore to fish. As a result, sometimes people are exhausted and washed away by the tide and die!
Today eels are critically endangered and protected, but that was not the case decades ago. In the 1970s, eel young could be seen everywhere in qiantang River. At most, thousands of eel young could be caught in a net. At most, a fish could be sold for a few dollars.
In the 1980s and 1990s, due to a variety of factors, the number of eel seedlings declined rapidly and the amount of eel catches declined. Many people even sold their net boats and switched to other occupations.
The turning point occurred in 2015 when the price of eel skyrocketed like a rocket, and the eel seedling fishing industry, which no one paid attention to, suddenly "revived". The purchase price of one eel seedling rose from a few cents to a few yuan, then to a dozen yuan, then to 20 yuan, and now has reached 50 yuan!
So the question is, if baby eel are so expensive, why not? Why did you risk stealing? Is it to make money? Why is the price of eel fry so high? What should we pay attention to in the breeding process of eel fry? How can eel fry be productive and efficient?
The growth of baby eel is extremely slow. If you want to get enough and good quality seedlings, you have to start at the source. Impossible to realize eel artificial breeding, there is a forced "difficulties "!
Eel is a typical migratory fish, which grows in freshwater lakes and migrates to spawning grounds to reproduce after maturity. However, due to the influence of various natural conditions and human factors, eel spawning grounds often coexist with other fish. This situation not only causes the waste of resources, but also seriously pollutes the water environment and threatens human health. The true spawning site of eels remained elusive for centuries, and only in recent decades has the mystery been unraveled.
In 1991, a team from the University of Tokyo, Japan, planted a large plankton net 500 meters to the west of the Mariana Trench and caught nearly a thousand young eels that were two to five days old and four to six centimeters long. DNA confirmed that they belonged to the same species as eels in waters near Japan and China.
The Marianna Health trench, by the way, is 2,550 km long, with an average width of 70 km and a maximum depth of 6 to 11 km. There lived a kind of fish called eel. It has a strange habit of eating baby eel, and it is very good for its growth. This fish grows very fast. They can grow to about 100 kilograms a day. When eels reach the Mariana trench and stop feeding, their gonads are further developed. The female eels can produce 8 to 10 million eggs at the same time. After spawning, eels die due to physical exertion.
The baby eels then drift west and north from the North Equatorial Current, taking three months to reach the shores of Japan, Taiwan and Mainland China, just in time for January. At this time, it was the overwintering period in northern China, and the water temperature was low, so the eels began to feed and move, and gradually adapted to the environmental conditions. The winter climate in southern China is warm and humid, which is conducive to the breeding and growth of eel seedlings. Then eels will welcome rapid growth in the Yangtze River and other freshwater rivers, lakes and estuaries!
To achieve artificial breeding of eel seedlings, there is another difficulty, namely eel degeneration. Because in nature, there is an obvious gender differentiation between female crucian carp and male eel, that is, female eel is amphoteric (male), and realgar eel is unisexual. When there are more female eels in the habitat waters, some eels become male, which greatly reduces the probability of breeding with large numbers of female eels.
In addition, the researchers found that eels will mating, in the depths of the ocean development, and prefer the sea near the mariana trench, because the deep trench for other parts of the environment and food, it is difficult to simulate such as eel pups love to eat "Marine snow", "Marine snow" is a kind of large amounts of organic debris stick slime, the key is the formation of the material is extremely complex and accident, So far, no suitable feed has been found for newly hatched eel seedlings.
It should be noted that the high price of eel is rooted in the substantial increase in demand. Data show that in 2021, more than 500,000 eel enthusiasts ate eel three times a month, a figure that has soared by 75% compared with 2020. The huge demand has inspired the enthusiasm of fishermen to breed eel, and the high price of eel seedlings is not hard to understand.
Eels can currently be farmed through artificial insemination, but at a cost of 60,000 yuan and cannot be produced on a large scale, there is still a long way to go.
