Eel Farming: A Theoretical Research Design on Improving the Success of Eel Reproduction in Captivity

This thesis’s goal was to design a theoretical research study based on a literature review on improving the aquaculture of European eels. Aquaculture is the farming of aquatic species such as fish. The European eel is a critically endangered catadromous fish species that faces a continuous decline in wild populations over the years due to pollution, climate change, industrial development, and overfishing. The replenishing of the fishery stock of European eels relies heavily on the wild population since there is no sustainable way of creating a generational captive population. The reason for this is that the lifecycle and environmental triggers of freshwater eels are relatively unknown due to their long lifespan, migratory lifestyle, metamorphoses, and sex differentiation timing. The primary focus of the design was to use different hormonal regiments and compared their effects on hatch rate, clutch size, survival rate, and lifespan of the juvenile eels. From this, it was concluded that the mother eel’s lipid storage impacts the quality of yolk sacs which in turn impacts the survival of leptocephali (eel larvae). The primary focus on eel population recovery should be habitat restoration and research on the leptocephalus stage since they both have the most evidence of success in eel population recovery.