Animal · France, Spain, Portugal
European eel
Anguilla anguilla — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The European eel begins life as a see-through leaf-shaped larva in the Sargasso Sea, far out in the western Atlantic Ocean. Where it came from was one of the oldest riddles in natural history, and part of it is still unsolved.
Picture credit: jujurenoult (CC BY 4.0) · jujurenoult (CC BY 4.0) · jujurenoult (CC BY 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the European eel live?
Home: rivers, lakes and coasts of Europe, and the open Sargasso Sea.
In the wild it lives in these countries: France, Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy.
Conservation status from the IUCN: critically endangered.
The short profile
Fully grown: 45 to 100 cm. It weighs about 1 kilograms. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
The flat glassy larva drifts eastwards with the ocean currents for many months until it reaches the coasts of Europe and North Africa as a finger-long glass eel. There it changes into a yellow eel and moves into rivers, lakes and harbours, hunting worms, snails, crayfish and small fish at night for anything from five to twenty years. When its time comes, the eel turns silver, its eyes grow large for life in the open ocean, and it sets off on a swim of several thousand kilometres back towards the Sargasso Sea. For centuries nobody could say where eels came from, because nobody ever found an egg or a young eel in a river; around 1920 the Danish scientist Johannes Schmidt worked out the answer by mapping where the smallest larvae turned up. Even so, no one has ever watched eels spawn in the wild, and it was only in 2022 that satellite tags followed adult eels all the way from the Azores into the Sargasso Sea. Meanwhile the number of glass eels arriving in Europe has fallen enormously since the 1970s, held down by dams, pollution, parasites and illegal trade. Fish passes, ladders and stricter rules are meant to give the species room to recover.
Find it on the globe
European eel is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
What does a European eel look like?
It has a long, snake-like body with a tiny head, a single fin running along the back and tail, and skin so slippery it is hard to hold. Most are between 45 centimetres and a metre long, and the females grow bigger than the males.
Where does the European eel spawn?
Everything points to the Sargasso Sea, a warm, weed-filled patch of the western Atlantic near Bermuda, thousands of kilometres from any European river. The smallest larvae have always been found there, and in 2022 tagged adults were tracked into that area for the first time.
Why is the European eel so rare now?
The number of young eels reaching Europe has dropped by around ninety per cent since the 1970s, and the IUCN lists the species as critically endangered. Dams and weirs block the way upstream, wetlands have been drained, and eels are still caught and traded illegally.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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