Buy all three books about our amazing long fin eels for $35 (RRP $62)

Aotearoa New Zealand's long fin eels are unique and amazing creatures. The longfin eel (Anguilla dieffenbachii) is the world's largest and longest-lived freshwater eel, and is a creature of great cultural and biological significance. They can live to 100 years or more and have a life cycle that includes swimming from their home in Aotearoa up into the Pacific Ocean to breed only once before they die. 

Pollution, commercial fishing and habitat destruction threaten our eels and their conservation status is "at risk and declining".

Learn more about these amazing native fish through these three books:

Velvet & Elvis

Velvet & Elvis is a gorgeous and simple book; an important story of New Zealand's long fin eel told with Stephanie Bowman's stunning paintings. 

Old Velvet the longfin eel has made New Zealand's Lake Rotoiti her home for 101 years. Lately, as hungry male eels swim around smelling for food, she rests her soft, velvety belly on the bottom. Her tummy is now filled with millions of tiny eggs, leaving no room for food. Velvet knows her time in this protected water is ending. And now, she has something more important to do than eating.

Eel Song

Join Aotearoa’s amazing longfin eels on their migration from the silver-cold streams, rivers and lakes in which they grew up, to the tropical Pacific Islands far away. Once there, the longfins spawn and when the eggs hatch, tiny, leaf-like baby eels drift on ocean currents back to Aotearoa.

Freshwater Fishes

Learn more about our longfin eel and where they fit in with the rest of our amazing native freshwater fishes, such as galaxiids, lamprey, bullies, flounder, smelt and torrentfish. They live such secretive and hidden lives that many New Zealanders have never seen them, or even know where to look for them.