[pvaldes]

Smuggling also. In the last decade some cargo of alive eels had been found inside lugagges in airports flying to Asia.

There is an american Nematode parasite also that castrate the European eels.

Plus, overfishing, contamination, invasive species of fishes, drough, engineering of rivers, by-caught, propellers in dam pipes that cut them in chunks while swimming... And can't be breed in captivity.

The animal will go extinct in this century by greed, as usual.

[jna_sh]

They can now be induced to mate in captivity, after a long course of hormone treatments and a 2000km trip on a “water treadmill” to mimic their migration. The current problem is that the larvae don’t survive past the first week. If I recall correctly, the current hypothesis is nutritional, and there’s work being done on understanding the phytoplankton makeup of the Sargasso Sea to determine how the larvae should be fed.