Unravelling the eel’s slippery story

IN 1950s Limerick, we turned over stones at low tide in the bed of the Shannon to catch eel-fry wriggling underneath.

The little creatures, a few centimetres long, were plentiful back then, but not any more; the European eel is in trouble.

Numbers have fallen by 95% since the mid 1980s; the species is now ‘critically endangered’. That the cause of the problem is unknown is hardly surprising; we know so little about this elusive creature.