EXCITED schoolchildren waved goodbye to 6,000 baby eels they have reared and studied for three months, when they set them free into the wild.
The 150 children at Purleigh Primary school walked the short distance from their school down to New Hall Vineyards to release the tiny 2.5-inch-long elvers that were living in a tank in the school hall.
The eels have been looked after by the children as part of a national campaign funded and organised by the Severn and Wye Smokery to teach the children about the critically endangered species.
Susannah Hall, affectionately known as the "eel lady", is the education co-ordinator for the schools project in Essex.
She said: "The children have interacted really well with the eels, and it was a fantastic morning watching the children pour them into the pond. All the children tried eating smoked eel for the first time, it surprised me just how much they were all up for trying them.
"They were holding onto the eels as they were going to release them, saying that they were like spaghetti and all wriggly.
"It has been fantastic watching the children learn about the eels; now they will go to live in ponds, rivers and wetlands all over Essex. They are a very adaptable species and can live in all sorts of places, even in small ditches."
The children wrote messages on paper to the departing including: "behave yourself on the way home", "be nice to other eels" and "I hope you get home to the Sargasso Sea".
"I think they will be very tired when they get home, and I hope they had a good time at my school. I wanted them to stay longer but they need to go back. I know that everyone loved having them here," said ten-year-old pupil Sophie Brennan.
The European eel lives a well-travelled life – they are born in the Sargasso Sea, near Bermuda, and migrate on the ocean currents to freshwater rivers, lakes and ponds all over Europe.
As they arrive in Europe they change into "glass eels", or elvers, before growing into "yellow eels" and then "silver eels" as they become fully grown.
Reaching roughly 2ft long at sexual maturity, they migrate back to the Sargasso Sea to reproduce.
The Purleigh schoolchildren looked after and fed the glass eels for a period of about 10 weeks.
During this period they learnt about the fishery, the environment that they live in and the significance of human actions on both.
The eels are listed as critically endangered on the International Union of the Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Red List, and have been in steady decline all over Europe.
