TY - JOUR
T1 - Seamounts, new moon and eel spawning
T2 - The search for the spawning site of the Japanese eel
AU - Tsukamoto, Katsumi
AU - Otake, Tsuguo
AU - Mochioka, Noritaka
AU - Lee, Tae Won
AU - Fricke, Hans
AU - Inagaki, Tadashi
AU - Aoyama, Jun
AU - Ishikawa, Satoshi
AU - Kimura, Shingo
AU - Miller, Michael J.
AU - Hasumoto, Hiroshi
AU - Oya, Machiko
AU - Suzuki, Yuzuru
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank all scientists who participated in the eel cruises who worked together in discussing the sampling design, operating the nets, sorting samples and analyzing the catch data and oceanographic information. We wrote this paper on behalf of all the scientists aboard, and we also thank all the crew of the Hakuho Maru and the Suruga Maru for their help during the cruises. This work was supported in part by Grants-in-Aid Nos. 07306022, 07556046, 08041139 and 08456094, 10460081, 11691177 from the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture, Japan, and by grant No. JSPS-RFTF 97L00901 from the ‘Research for the Future Program’ of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. KT was supported by the Research Foundation ‘Touwa Shokuhin Shink-oukai’ and the Eel Research Foundation ‘Noborikai’.
PY - 2003/3/1
Y1 - 2003/3/1
N2 - After analyzing all the collection data for larvae of the Japanese eel, Anguilla japonica, in the western North Pacific, we found that the spawning site of this species appears to be near three seamounts in the West Mariana Ridge, 2000-3000 km away from their freshwater habitats. These seamounts are located in the westward flow of the North Equatorial Current and are hypothesized to provide cues for migrating silver eels and to serve as possible aggregation sites for spawning. Back-calculated birth dates based on otolith microstructure of leptocephali indicate that the Japanese eel does not spawn continuously during the long spawning season from April to November, but is synchronized to spawn periodically once a month during new moon. This lunar periodicity of spawning and the seamount spawning hypothesis are new developments in the millennium-old mystery of eel spawning that has fascinated naturalists since the time of Aristotle.
AB - After analyzing all the collection data for larvae of the Japanese eel, Anguilla japonica, in the western North Pacific, we found that the spawning site of this species appears to be near three seamounts in the West Mariana Ridge, 2000-3000 km away from their freshwater habitats. These seamounts are located in the westward flow of the North Equatorial Current and are hypothesized to provide cues for migrating silver eels and to serve as possible aggregation sites for spawning. Back-calculated birth dates based on otolith microstructure of leptocephali indicate that the Japanese eel does not spawn continuously during the long spawning season from April to November, but is synchronized to spawn periodically once a month during new moon. This lunar periodicity of spawning and the seamount spawning hypothesis are new developments in the millennium-old mystery of eel spawning that has fascinated naturalists since the time of Aristotle.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/0037670059
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/0037670059#tab=citedBy
U2 - 10.1023/A:1023926705906
DO - 10.1023/A:1023926705906
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0037670059
SN - 0378-1909
VL - 66
SP - 221
EP - 229
JO - Environmental Biology of Fishes
JF - Environmental Biology of Fishes
IS - 3
ER -