What Is a Group of Eels Called?
A slippery, shape-shifting fish whose life cycle is stranger than its collective noun.
A group of eels is most often called a bind, with fry and swarm also used, especially for young eels and mass migrations. Eels (order Anguilliformes) spend most of their lives in fresh water before making an extraordinary migration to the open ocean to spawn.
What Is a Group of Eels Called?
Bind is the traditional, most distinctive term for a group of eels, likely inspired by the way eels tangle and knot together when gathered in numbers. Fry is a more general fish term that applies to young eels specifically, while swarm tends to show up when describing the mass upstream migrations of young eels moving together in huge numbers.
Where Did the Name Come From?
Like most English collective nouns for animals, “bind” traces back to the medieval hunting and fishing terminology collected in the Book of Saint Albans (1486). The word fits eels particularly well: anyone who has seen a tank or bucket of live eels knows they have a habit of physically knotting themselves together, which likely inspired the term long before anyone understood their true migratory biology.
Eel Facts
- Not the same as electric eels: True eels belong to the order Anguilliformes. Electric eels are actually a type of knifefish (order Gymnotiformes) and are more closely related to catfish than to true eels.
- An epic migration: European and American eels are catadromous, meaning they live in fresh water but travel thousands of miles to the Sargasso Sea to spawn, the reverse journey of migratory fish like salmon.
- A life in stages: Eels pass through several dramatically different life stages: a flat, transparent larva called a leptocephalus, then a glass eel, then an elver, before finally maturing into a yellow eel and, eventually, a silver eel ready to spawn.
- Skin that breathes: Some eel species can survive for hours out of water by absorbing oxygen directly through their moist skin, allowing them to briefly slither across damp ground.
- A second set of jaws: Moray eels use a set of pharyngeal jaws deep in their throat that shoot forward to help drag prey down, a feature more commonly associated with movie monsters than real fish.
Example Sentences
- A bind of eels writhed together at the bottom of the holding tank.
- Researchers tracked a swarm of glass eels moving upriver each spring.
Other Names for a Group of Eels
Bind remains the most distinctive and commonly cited term specifically for eels. Fry is borrowed from general fish terminology and refers to young eels rather than the group itself, while swarm is used more loosely, typically to describe the sheer numbers involved in a seasonal migration rather than a fixed social group.
🧠 Test Your Eel Knowledge
Three quick questions. See what stuck.
1. What’s the most common term for a group of eels?
2. Which family do true eels belong to?
3. What term describes eels’ fresh-water-to-ocean migration pattern?
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a group of eels called?
Most often a bind, with fry and swarm also used, particularly for young eels and mass migrations.
Are electric eels true eels?
No. Electric eels belong to a different order (Gymnotiformes) and are more closely related to catfish than to true eels.
Why do eels migrate so far to spawn?
European and American eels are catadromous, meaning they live in fresh water but travel to the ocean, specifically the Sargasso Sea, to breed.
What is a baby eel called?
A newly hatched eel is a leptocephalus, which develops into a glass eel and then an elver before maturing.
Can eels survive out of water?
Some species can survive brief periods out of water by absorbing oxygen through their skin, especially in cool, damp conditions.
A Fish Defined by the Journey
A bind of eels is a fitting name for a fish whose whole life is defined by movement, from a transparent hatchling drifting across an ocean current to a mature eel retracing that same path years later to spawn and complete the cycle.