That makes sense. It’s relatively warm; there’s a bunch of seaweed, and the waters are calm.
Edit: Wait, how was this a mystery?
“The 1920–1922 Dana expeditions, led by Johannes Schmidt, determined that the European eel’s breeding sites were in the Sargasso Sea.”
Hank Green can tell you the full mystery:
https://youtu.be/acEIGorImGs?si=_xi2IF-GEssAuyZ-
tl:dw: We knew that’s where baby eels came from but we didn’t know how the adults got there or what the larvae looked like. Baby eel larvae was misidentified as another species and adult eel can take up to 18 months traveling at the bottom of the ocean to get there, during which time they grow their gonads which was another mystery.
for anyone curious it got its name from the seaweed that grows there https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargassum
This is absolutely wild! I’m so glad I saw this today.
In the ocean?
Underwater at least; there are fresh water eels.
From the included article-
When it’s time to mate, eels are very determined to make it to their breeding site at the Sargasso Sea. The Sargasso Sea, a two-million-square-mile span of ocean, is the site in which all freshwater eels mate
It’s way the hell down there in the article, though. Apparently they travel to freshwater as larva.
Eels are freaking weird, man.
