A silver eel can survive up to three years without food, just sort of slowly consuming itself from the inside. And they swim all the way back to the sargasso sea, seven thousand kilometers, without eating. They disappear down in the depths of the sagasso sea and reproduce, and then they die. But like patrick said, nobody's seen them reproduce in the sagasso sea, and nobody's seen a dead eel there either.
Where eels come from is a surprisingly difficult question to answer, in large part because scientists have never actually seen them reproduce in the wild. Gastropod explains why eels are somehow still so mysterious.
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