The Danish Galathea 3 expedition spent nine days fishing for eels in the Sargasso Sea, hoping to solve the mystery of their reproduction. But the mystery remains. The area is like a biological desert according to ICES scientist Henrik Sparholt.
The Galathea 3 expedition, initiated in August 2006, is the largest Danish research expedition in 50 years. It is navigating around the world, functioning as a platform for Danish research projects.
Henrik Sparholt was a crew member on one of the vessels, Vaeddaren, and he has just returned from three weeks on the Galathea expedition. The Vaeddaren crew was trawling in the Sargasso Sea area in an effort to find out more about the mysterious eel. Unfortunately, after nine days of fishing they had not caught a single adult eel and the echo sounder didn’t show much either. Henrik Sparholt describes the area as a “biological desert”.
They did, however, catch about 230 eel larvae which will be used for stomach analysis as well as genetic studies. Information about the stomach content is important for future aquaculture and artificial reproduction, since current efforts seem to fail due to larval starvation. The genetic studies will focus on the issue of sub-populations. It is not yet known whether there are any, but if there are, it might be crucial for future management and restocking of eels.
The Vaeddaren also sampled other ecosystem components in order to investigate and hopefully understand why this area is so important for the larvae and why the adult eels do not spawn closer to the fresh water areas where they grow up.
Henrik Sparholt is very pleased with his journey, even if they didn’t reach their highest goal, since they still made some significant findings.