European eels avoid swimming through plumes of treated wastewater Christian GUY/imageBROKER.com GmbH/Alamy
Discharges from sewage treatment plants into rivers may act as a barrier to migrating fish. European eels (Anguilla anguilla) seem to deliberately avoid plumes of treated wastewater, in some cases delaying their journeys by several days.
Sewage treatment creates a complex chemical cocktail – 鈥渢housands and thousands of chemicals, and we don鈥檛 know the exact composition鈥, says at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
When studying how hydropower or pumping stations delayed or killed migrating eels, his team noticed that the fish sometimes slowed down when…
