Morphology and Growth
The body is long and snakelike, roughly tubular and the head is small, with the jaws reaching back to below the eye or further. The dorsal and anal fins are of roughly equal length. The colour varies considerably from one individual to another; a deep olive-green is typical but it can be much lighter; golden or even (rarely) yellowish. There are no markings of note, but the underside is pale, often silvery, and the fins greenish. When full grown, they reach about 90 cm. The short-finned eel has a typical regeneration time of 15 to 30 years for females and it reaches a maximum size of about 1.1 m and 3 kg. Males tend to be slower growing and reach a smaller adult size. Anguillid eels are undifferentiated gonochoristic fish. This means that the sex of the animal is determined from an undifferentiated gonad. Differentiation then occurs and an eel becomes male or female, and this is generally correlated to the size (20.0-22.5 cm) of the animal not its age.
Read more about this topic: Short-finned Eel
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