Dramatic effect of pop-up satellite tags on eel swimming

The journey of the European eel to the spawning area in the Sargasso Sea is still a mystery. Several trials have been carried out to follow migrating eels with pop-up satellite tags (PSATs), without much success. As eels are very efficient swimmers, tags likely interfere with their high swimming efficiency. Here we report a more than twofold increase in swimming cost caused by a regular small satellite tag. The impact was determined at a range of swimming speeds with and without tag in a 2-m swimming tunnel. These results help to explain why the previous use of PSATs to identify spawning sites in the Sargasso Sea was thus far unsuccessful.

• Publication year

  2011

• Venue

  Die Naturwissenschaften

• Publication date

  2011-05-19

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1007/s00114-011-0805-0PMID 21594613PMCID 3121937
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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