Silver Darlings

Why we need to re-think our relationship with our finned friends

It’s easy to take fish for granted but we shouldn’t.

In terms of species, they are easily the most numerous vertebrates with more than 30,000 species – more than the total number of all bird, mammal, reptile, and amphibian species combined.

And they are truly ancient – the class of ray-finned fishes (which account for 99% of all existing species) first emerged in the early Devonian, 400 million years ago, which is 100 million years before the earliest reptiles and 200 million years before mammals. And they come in an astonishing range of shapes and sizes, from the 2 ton, 8 metre-long giant oarfish, to the tiny male anglerfish, which barely stretches to 6 millimetres (its printed name is twice as long as its body).

Fish are also genuinely mysterious. Let’s dust off just one enduring piscine enigma: the breeding cycle of the European eel, Anguilla anguilla.