![]() It’s been nearly a century since Schmidt’s hypothesis, but eels still haven’t surrendered their secrets. He guessed this calm stretch of ocean was the eel asylum - the place where European and American eels are born, spawn and die. It’s an enormous patch of seaweed in the southwest Atlantic Ocean. The tinier the eels he found, the closer he figured he was to their spawning grounds.Įventually, he sailed from northern Europe toward the Caribbean, ultimately catching dime-sized eels near the Sargasso Sea. ![]() So Schmidt journeyed farther into the open ocean. Then, in 1904, he caught a young eel south of Iceland, implying the fish were indeed spawning at sea. Schmidt’s early sea expeditions stayed close to shore, casting nets off European coastlines. But by the early 1900s, Schmidt and others suspected eels bred in the open ocean, instead of their lifelong freshwater homes. Aristotle suggested the slithering species emerged spontaneously from the earth. Schmidt was trying to solve an ancient mystery about one of nature’s strangest fish: eels. The Danish biologist surrendered the hunt only after his ship was torn to pieces on a Caribbean coral reef. Johannes Schmidt spent 25 years chasing an enigmatic fish across the Atlantic Ocean.
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