Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 214, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 September 1920 — HAS FOUND CRADLE OF EEL [ARTICLE]

HAS FOUND CRADLE OF EEL

Scientist Tells the World All About the Habits of That Migratory Aquatic Creature. The eel has been tracked to his cradle. It has taken us 2,000 years to learn that eels, living in ponds and rivers climb out when full grown, crawl over the land, find a river running to the ocean, go out to sea, and lay eggs which produce offspring that come back in billions up the rivers from which 1 their parents descended, says London Tit-Bits. A scientist has now tracked down these elusive marvels to the spawning grounds. It is the Sargasso sea, that enormous sea garden through which Columbus first sailed to the terror of his crews, from September to October, 1492. Of course, that is not the only nursery. Upon hatching, the eel larvae drift with the current, undergo a marvelous transformation, reach Europe, swarm up the river, climb the batiks, cross dusty fields and parched meadows to Inland ponds and ditches, and then settle there for the next seven or eight years, when they swim back to the Sargasso to lay their eggs and die. Is not that a crowning marvel of the migratory instinct? Across the Atlantic in infancy, to fatten In a wayside Hngllsh pond, and back again, grown up, across the wide ocean.