“Savor the rare taste of fully cultivated Japanese eels! Learn how Japan’s government is pioneering eel farming to preserve this endangered species”
That Japanese summer delicacy of roasted eel-Japanese eels raised from eggs, braised with a tangy sauce and sprinkled with prickly mountain pepper, is in question! These fishes with their mysterious migrations become increasingly endangered.
Soaring demand for Japanese eel, or Anguilla japonica, helped put the creatures on the International Union of Conservation of Nature’s “Red List” of endangered species in 2014. It’s spurring poaching of similar species off the U.S. east coast.
Why are they getting extinct?
The threat of extinction, and rocketing prices for grilled eels believed to help build stamina for withstanding sweltering summer days, have shocked many Japanese gourmands and restaurants that specialize in the dish.
Sustainable production
Even though they may play an important role in Japanese food culture, until recently, very little was known about the life cycles of eels—where they spawned or how tiny glass eels, all but transparent, manage to travel back to their freshwater habitats in Asia and elsewhere.
The supplies are reliant on wild-catching juveniles and farm-raising them to adulthood, while demand surges. While it originated in Japan, the practice has spread to Taiwan and mainland China.
Complete Eel cycle = Conservation of Japanese cultural delicacy
According to Tsukamoto, his finding in 2009 of Japanese eel larvae and spawning adults west of the Mariana Ridge, near Guam, has enabled him and other researchers to determine the right diet and environmental conditions for spawning eels and their offspring.
Of late, each lab can raise only about 3,000-4,000 a year. A lack of funds is hindering the construction of the infrastructure needed to make such operations commercially viable by producing tens of thousands of eels a year.
Complete farming of eels and some other endangered species is a way to help them survive—in fact, by relieving the pressure from soaring demand.
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