• Episode 401: El Gran Maja and Other Giant Eels

  • Oct 7 2024
  • Length: 11 mins
  • Podcast

Episode 401: El Gran Maja and Other Giant Eels

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  • Thanks to Murilo for suggesting El Gran Maja for our first monster month episode of 2024! Further reading: The Loch Ness Monster: If It’s Real, Could It Be an Eel? Further watching: Borisao Blois's YouTube channel [I have not watched very many of his videos so can't speak to how appropriate they all are for younger viewers] El Gran Maja, YouTube star: The European eel [photo by GerardM - http://www.digischool.nl/bi/onderwaterbiologie/, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=284678]: A supposed 21-foot eel, a product of trick photography: The slender giant moray eel [photo by BEDO (Thailand) - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40262310]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. It’s monster month, where we talk about weird, mysterious, and sometimes spooky creatures! This year I’ve decided to be less spooky and more weird, so let’s kick off the month with an episode all about gigantic eels. Thanks to Murilo for suggesting our first giant eel, El Gran Maja. El Gran Maja is an eel that is supposed to live off the coast of northern Puerto Rico, and it’s supposed to grow 675 meters long. That’s 2,215 feet, or almost half a mile. That is an excessive amount of eel. Obviously, an eel that big couldn’t actually exist. By the time its front end noticed danger, its back end could already be eaten by a whole family of sharks. But maybe it was based on a real eel that grows really long. Let’s take a look at some eels we know exist, and then we’ll return to El Gran Maja and learn some very interesting things about it. Eels are fish, but not every animal that’s called an eel is actually an eel. Some are just eel-shaped, meaning they’re long and slender. Electric eels aren’t actually eels, for instance, but are more closely related to catfish. Most eels live in the ocean at the beginning and end of their lives, and freshwater in between. For example, the European eel has a life cycle that’s pretty common among eels. It hatches in the ocean into a larval stage that looks sort of like a transparent leaf. Over the next six months to three years, the larvae swim and float through the ocean currents, closer and closer to Europe, feeding on plankton and other tiny food. Toward the end of this journey, they grow into their next phase, where they resemble eels instead of leaf-shaped tadpoles, but are still mostly transparent. They’re called glass eels at this point. The glass eels make their way into rivers and slowly migrate upstream. Once a glass eel is in a good environment it metamorphoses again into an elver, which is basically a small eel. As it grows it gains more pigment until it’s called a yellow eel. Over the next decade or two it grows and matures, until it reaches its adult length—typically around 3 feet, or about a meter. When it’s fully mature, its belly turns white and its sides silver, which is why it’s called a silver eel at this stage. Silver eels migrate more than 4,000 miles, or 6500 km, back to the Sargasso Sea to spawn, lay eggs, and die. One place where European eels live is Loch Ness in Scotland, and in the 1970s the idea that sightings of the Loch Ness Monster might actually be sightings of unusually large eels became popular. A 2018 environmental DNA study brought the idea back up, since the study discovered that there are a whole, whole lot of eels in Loch Ness. The estimate is a population of more than 8,000 eels in the loch, which is good since the European eel is actually critically endangered. But most of the eels found in Loch Ness are smaller than average, and the longest European eel ever measured was only about 4 feet long, or 1.2 meters. An eel can’t stick its head out of the water like Nessie is supposed to do, but it does sometimes swim on its side close to the water’s surface, which could result in sightings of a string of many humps undulating through the wate...
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