In this episode, I’m joined by Molly Fowkes, a PhD researcher at the Lancaster Environment Centre, whose work dives into the hidden social lives of one of the UK’s most endangered and enigmatic species — the European eel.

Molly studies a unique eel population living inside a reservoir: a human-made freshwater system where eels are unable to complete their epic oceanic migration, yet somehow persist at high densities over long periods of time. Using high-resolution acoustic tracking and social network analysis, Molly explores how individual eels move, associate, and organise themselves, and what these unseen social dynamics can tell us about resilience, behaviour, and conservation in increasingly human-altered freshwater ecosystems.

Molly´s IG: intertidalmolly
Impact Storytelling Podcast IG: impact.storytelling.podcast