In Indonesia, eel still sounds unfamiliar than other fishery resources. Meanwhile, in Japan, eel is one of the fancy fish due to its high cost.
It costs high because it contains high nutrient including vitamin and protein which make the eel more popular than fish or meat.
“The high market demand of this eel causes the number of catching eels in Japan and Europe declining over time. The reasons for the declining number of eel are overfishing, pollution, alteration of sea condition, disease, habitat destruction, and dam construction which hampers the eel migration process,” said Dr. Noritaka Michioka at Faculty of Biology UGM on Friday (19/5) during a general lecture.
Therefore, according to Noritaka Michioka, this condition raises motivation to conduct a research for encouraging conservation and cultivation without relying on the catching in nature. Noritaka Michioka who is a researcher at the Fishery Biology Laboratory, Faculty of Agriculture, Kyushu University, Japan, said several eel species are included on the IUCN red list as threatened species.
“Therefore, it needs the role of Biology. The only way to solve this problem is by doing a survey on the spawning area and produce the eel,” he added.
Noritaka Michioka said he had done an expedition since 1991 to look for the exact locations of spawning area to know the character and habitat of this kind of fish. Through the long expedition with many failures, he succeeded to be the first man that found adult eels in high seas in the world.
“Eel is spawning in Mariana Island area, precisely in the mountains under the sea and its surrounding areas,” he added.
In the end of the lecture, Noritaka Michioka hopes he can conduct a collaborative research regarding eel in Indonesia with UGM because Indonesia has many eel species but its population is smaller than the eel which lives in temperate climate.