Yahoo TV

A researcher on Mustang Island, Texas, showed off a huge American eel he found washed ashore in video from Tuesday, January 17.

Jace Tunnell, a reserve director at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute, shared a video on YouTube of him enthusiastically presenting a female American eel, which he said was around four foot long.

“This is basically as big as they get,” Tunnell said. “This is likely a female, they’re larger than the males.”

Tunnell added that large females can have up to four million eggs.

The American eel is listed as endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species.

Tunnell explained that this was in part due to the negative impact of dam building on the eel’s life cycle over the past century. “Whenever all the dams and stuff started coming in, the life cycle of these fish, of going up the rivers, coming down the rivers, and going way out in to the ocean to be able to have their eggs […] with those dams on the rivers, really, they weren’t able to do the things they would normally do.”

The Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve, which Tunnell manages, conducts research and education into preserving healthy Texas coastlines. Credit: Jace Tunnell, Reserve Director at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute via Storyful