A multimillion-dollar Japanese demand for glass eels as a gourmet delicacy is fuelling intensive research into the fish’s life cycle at the University of Technology, Sydney.

The tiny immature eels are dished out to Asian tables at a cost of more than $1000 per kilo and could become a lucrative new fisheries industry for Australia.

Glass eels are an immature form of the long-finned eel which migrate 6000 kilometres to spawn. Little is known about the eels which have a complex life cycle and are hard to catch, sample and track.

UTS has partnered with the NSW Fisheries Research Institute to uncover the clues about the eels and assess how viably and sustainably they could be farmed.

UTS Science Faculty Associate Professor David Booth said the life cycle of the long-finned eel begins in the freshwater rivers of NSW. When they are aged 10 to 50 years, they swim down our rivers and then out to the Coral Sea, north of New Caledonia to spawn.

"No one has ever seen the eels during their spawning, though we believe they form huge spawning aggregations in the Coral Sea," Professor Booth said. "The baby eels are called leptocephali and are only six or seven centimetres long and flat like a leaf.

"The adults die after spawning, and the tiny leaf larvae waft down the coast where they grow into glass eels near the continental shelf.

"The translucent eels move up the brackish water of the estuaries until they reach a barrier such as a weir. They are great climbers, and when the new moon appears, they inch their way up the weir and over into fresh water streams and dams, where they stay for up to 60 years."

UTS PhD student Veronica Silberschneider travels more then 3000km per month visiting dam sites to collect glass eels for study.

The data she is collecting about the eels’ movements and ages will assist the NSW Fisheries determine if the eels can be harvested.

"At present the legal harvest of glass eels stands at only 20 to 40 kilos annually and even this could potentially be damaging adult eel stocks," Professor Booth said.

The glass eel project is a collaborative venture with NSW Fisheries, where Ms Silberschneider has been working under the supervision of Dr Bruce Pease, a fisheries scientist conducting research on estuarine fishes.

The research is funded through a Fisheries Research and Development Corporation (FRDC) grant of $360,000 over three years that commenced in 1998. In 1999 Professor Booth obtained an ARC Strategic Partnerships with Industry-Research and Training (SPIRT) grant of $85,000 over three years to fund a student and research.