TOKYO, Nov. 4 (Xinhua) -- A university in Japan announced recently that it has succeeded in complete farming of Japanese eels, in what it describes as the world's first feat of its kind by a university.
Kindai University in Osaka Prefecture, western Japan, recently achieved a "full-cycle" aquaculture of the eels, an endangered species and a prized delicacy, by hatching fish larvae from eggs and sperm collected from adult fish that were artificially hatched.
In 2010, the state-run Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency became the world's first body to achieve full-cycle eel farming, a process that involves incubating and cultivating eels, so they produce offspring. Kindai University is the first university to follow suit.
According to the university, it collected fertilized eggs from farmed parent eels at an experimental site of its Aquaculture Research Institute in the town of Nachikatsuura, Wakayama Prefecture, on July 5, and succeeded in hatching some the following day. Researchers also confirmed additional hatches on Aug. 3 and 24. As of Oct. 18, a total of some 600 eel larvae were growing.
But the university said it has struggled to sustain a large population of young eels due to the many mysteries surrounding their biology.
Although eels available on the Japanese market are 99.9 percent sourced from farms, they usually first need to be caught in the wild while still young. However, the catch of natural young eels, called glass eels, has plunged to some one-tenth of that in the 1980s, creating the need for the technology as it would enable producers to breed the fish from their eggs. ■
