Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
Eel Farming: A Theoretical Research Design on Improving the Success of Eel Reproduction in Captivity
This thesis’s goal was to design a theoretical research study based on a literature review on improving the aquaculture of European eels. Aquaculture is the farming of aquatic species such as fish. The European eel is a critically endangered catadromous fish species that faces a continuous decline in wild populations over the years due to pollution, climate change, industrial development, and overfishing. The replenishing of the fishery stock of European eels relies heavily on the wild population since there is no sustainable way of creating a generational captive population. The reason for this is that the lifecycle and environmental triggers of freshwater eels are relatively unknown due to their long lifespan, migratory lifestyle, metamorphoses, and sex differentiation timing. The primary focus of the design was to use different hormonal regiments and compared their effects on hatch rate, clutch size, survival rate, and lifespan of the juvenile eels. From this, it was concluded that the mother eel’s lipid storage impacts the quality of yolk sacs which in turn impacts the survival of leptocephali (eel larvae). The primary focus on eel population recovery should be habitat restoration and research on the leptocephalus stage since they both have the most evidence of success in eel population recovery.