Critically Endangered
European eel
Anguilla anguilla
European eel is a ray-finned fish in the family Anguillidae (order Anguilliformes) — Anguilla anguilla, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
European eels undergo five stages of development in their lifecycle: larva (leptocephalus), glass eel, elver, yellow eel, and silver eel. Adults in the yellow phase are typically around 45–65 centimetres (18–26 in) and rarely reach more than 1.0 metre (3 ft 3 in), but they can reach a length of up to 1.33 metres (4 ft 4 in) in exceptional cases.
Range and habitat
No country pin is stored for European eel on this catalog. That is a missing field, not proof the animal has no range.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
After spawning in the Sargasso Sea, they disperse northwards throughout the Atlantic Ocean, its coasts, and the rivers that empty into it. Feeding occurs mainly at night via scent, with prey consisting of worms, fish (among them ones too big to eat without biting off chunks), mollusks such as slugs, crustaceans such as crayfish, and occasionally plankton, when available in large quantities.
Seagulls also prey on elvers. Unlike many other migratory fish, eels begin their life cycle in the ocean, spending most of their lives in fresh inland water, or brackish coastal water before returning to the ocean to spawn and then die.
In crisis
The European eel is a critically endangered species. The TRAFFIC program is introducing traceability and legality systems throughout trade change to control and reverse the decline of the species. Hydroelectric dams have been shown to have a significant negative impact on eel populations.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
European eel is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on European eel, Wikidata item Q26387. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
