(Via Manurewa — Spread the News)
One eel of a story
Adrian Muller of Papamoa Beach says the story about eels growing to enormous size behind Waikato dams that a reader was told by a teacher would be mostly myth. "Eels live in rivers for many decades until some urge switches on in them and they stop eating and are compelled to leave their home territories, travel down stream, and swim thousands of kilometres on a final journey north to some unknown deep-sea trench near Tonga, where they breed then die.
"The dams may seem a barrier, but they each have huge turbines allowing water to flow from above to turn the blades and so create electricity. Many eels inadvertently go through these and many are minced up by the blades. A few do survive, and others go over the spillways, which are part of each dam, so escape unscathed.
"A better, and truer story to the one about these eels above the dams is that below the dams you may catch enormous trout, which have been feeding on minced up eels. Also baby eels somehow swim back to the exact same rivers their parents left from, and are able to climb back up these enormous HEP dams on wet nights, climbing vertical concrete walls to re-populate the rivers above the dams. If they are caught in the morning sunlight, they die. Sadly if they climb up the Huka Falls and reach Lake Taupo, they languish, and after about three weeks they die. So there are no eels in Lake Taupo at all. The reason for this is that the water there is deficient in a vital element for eels — iodine. "
