Acne: Fishes that strike the imagination

European eel is one of the most extraordinary fish that only meets on our planet. In their entire life, they undergo such a number of amazing metamorphoses and overcome such distances that their exploits startle. You can start with the fact that eels are fish that live in fresh water, but multiply in the ocean.

From all over the world, they sail for this in the Sargasso Sea. Only the hatched larvae carry a powerful ocean current to the shores of Europe. A long and incredibly dangerous journey lasts three years.

Only on the shores of Eurasia the eel, at last, reach seven to eight centimeters long, but on this difficult road does not end. Whatever you say, but eels are fish that are very persistent and consistent in their aspirations.

When they reach the rivers, they gradually climb up to the places where their parents lived. Here they live up to 25 years, and then they repeat the path of their ancestors to the Sargasso Sea. To overcome all this complex and insidious path, they are often forced to creep between the rivers up to a dozen kilometers!

And all this - for the sake of the road of seven thousand kilometers and spawning, after which they are waiting for death ... In a word, eels are fish that are very similar in this respect to salmon, but their migration passes the other way.

By the way, their tender and very tasty meat is valued since ancient times. Even at the feasts of the great Alexander of Macedon he was served the most distinguished guests. Even then, scientists did not give a rest to one question: "How do these fish multiply, if neither of them has ever found either caviar or milk"?

Then Aristotle put forward the assumption that eels are fish that originate in coastal mud!

Surprisingly, this thought of the great thinker was a dogma for ... two millennia. And only in 1694 the great Italian naturalist and naturalist Francesco Redi put forward the right assumption.

He spent several years watching the eels. Redi followed them and found out that these amazing creatures were beating into packs and swam down the rivers, heading for the seas. Indeed: the whole fish of the eel (where there is a large number of it) sometimes disappeared from some places, but no one paid any attention to these fluctuations in numbers.

Of course, few people believed him. After all, the naturalist did not provide any convincing evidence!

Indirect confirmation of the bold hypothesis was the experience of Cazzi, another Italian scientist and nobleman. Nearly 200 years after the theory of Reddy, he caught a very unusual fish in the Gulf of Messina, which no one had described before.

The "new species" was called leptotsefala. In 1897 a couple of such fish were placed in an aquarium and watched. A year later they were waited with a startling discovery: the bodies of leptotsefals shortened by a centimeter, lost a specific leaf form, turning into ordinary acne!

However, there are not only freshwater species. In particular, the sea eel fish is European. It grows to a length of three meters and can reach a weight of 120 kilograms!

By the way, the reproduction of this species has not yet been accurately studied. It is known that for spawning, eels descend to a huge depth. The breeding area is Gibraltar. But there are no details about the exact place of spawning, and the process itself has not been described to anyone yet.