CityReads | In Search of the Eel Question

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In Search of the Eel Question

There is much to be learned from how little we know about eels.

Patrik Svensson, 2020. The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination With the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World, HarperCollins.

Happy and Healthy New Year to all readers of CityReads. A bright new year starts with books.

What do you know about eels? If, like me, you only know that eel rice is delicious, then The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination With the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World by Swedish author Patrick Svensson will open your eyes and make you think throughout the book. This book draws multidisciplinary knowledge from the history of science, marine biology, zoology, botany, religion, philosophy, psychology, Swedish history, literature, and the science of environmental protection, and brings together the common quests of the eel question of the well-known or not-so-well-known historical figures such as Aristotle, Freud, Johannes Smit, and Rachel Carson, telling the story of human being's scientific quest of the eel question.  He also tells his own childhood experience of eel fishing with his father and the father-son bonding. This book further explores the human quest for the meaning of life, the perception of time, the reality of the earth's environmental changes and biological extinction.

The eel question

Surprisingly, we know very little about eels. For and foremost, how do eels reproduce?

Aristotle concluded that eels are not male or female, they neither spawn nor mate. One eel does not give life to another eel; eels live from the gift of rain. In other words, eels are created out of thin air.

More than 2,000 years after Aristotle's death, the eel remained a mystery to the natural science community.

In 1777, Carlo Mondini, professor of anatomy at the University of Bologna, Italy, first scientifically and accurately described the eggs and reproductive organs of a sexually mature female eel.

What about the male eel? It was harder than expected. in 1876, at the age of 19, Freud came to Trieste and spent his days in the laboratory dissecting eels caught from dockside fishmongers in an attempt to find the eel's testicles. Freud dissected 400 eels, but in vain. It was not until 20 years after Freud's failed attempt that a sexually mature male eel was found.

In 1879, a German marine biologist, Leopold Jacoby, wrote, somewhat dejectedly, in a report for the US Commission of Fish and Fisheries:

"To a person not acquainted with the circumstances of the case, it must seem astonishing, and it is certainly somewhat humiliating to men of science, that a fish which is commoner in many parts of the world than any other fish . . . which is daily seen at the market and on the table, has been able in spite of the powerful aid of modern science, to shroud the manner of its propagation, its birth, and its death in darkness, which even to the present day has not been dispelled. There has been an eel question ever since the existence of natural science."

In the 20th century, scientists gradually figured out that the eel is a creature of metamorphosis, transforming itself over the course of its life into four distinct beings: a tiny gossamer larva with huge eyes, floating toward Europe in the open sea; a shimmering glass eel, known as an elver, a few inches in length with visible insides, making its way along coasts and up rivers; a yellow-brown eel, the kind you might catch in ponds, which can move across dry land, hibernate in mud, and live quietly for half a century in a single place; and, finally, the silver eel, a long, powerful muscle that ripples its way back to sea. When this last metamorphosis happens, the eel's stomach dissolves—it will travel thousands of miles on its fat reserves alone—and its reproductive organs develop for the first time. In the eels of Europe, no one could find those organs because they did not yet exist.

New questions arises: When and where do the silver eels in the sea reproduce and where do they die?

The Danish marine biologist Johannes Schmidt was also fascinated by the eel problem. In the early 20th century, instead of enjoying a comfortable upper bourgeois life, Schmidt embarked on a sea voyage in the vast Atlantic Ocean to trace the travel routes of eels, trying to find the birthplace of eels by locating the youngest eels. The voyage of discovery lasted for almost 20 years, during which the First World War broke. Schmidt finally caught eel larvae small enough to determine the extent of the eel's breeding grounds: a special area in the western Atlantic Ocean, located in the northeast and north of the Caribbean Sea. This area is known as the Sargasso Sea, a sea within a sea. Schmidt submitted his report on the breeding grounds of the eels in 1923 and died of influenza in 1933.

"During the autumn months," Schmidt wrote as a kind of summary, "the silver eels leave the lakes and rivers and move out into the sea. Once beyond freshwater limits, the eels are, in most parts of Europe, outside our range of observation. No longer subject to pursuit by man, hosts of eels from the most distant corners of our continent can now shape their course south-west across the ocean, as their ancestors for unnumbered generations have done before them. How long the journey lasts we cannot say, but we know now the destination sought: a certain area situated in the western Atlantic, N.E. and N. of the West Indies. Here lie the breeding grounds of the eel."

This is why we now know—at least with some degree of certainty—where the eel reproduces. All our knowledge on this matter rests on Johannes Schmidt's work. What we don't know is why. Why there? What’s the point of the long, hopeless journey and all the trials and metamorphoses? What is there for the eel in the Sargasso Sea?

To date, (1) No human has ever seen two eels mate. (2) No one has ever seen a mature eel in the Sargasso Sea.

For Rachel Carson, she couldn't have found a better representative for the compelling complexity of the sea. She explained "to see an eel is something like meeting a person who has traveled to the most remote and wonderful places of the earth; in a flash I see a vivid picture of the strange places that eel has been—places which I, being merely human, can never visit."

About the silver eel's long journey to the Sargasso Sea, Rachel Carson wrote: "As long as the tide ebbed, eels were leaving the marshes and running out to sea. Thousands passed the lighthouse that night, on the first lap of a far sea journey. . . . And as they passed through the surf and out to sea, so they also passed from human  sight and almost from human knowledge."

Today eels are dying out and are in very high danger of extinction. And this is mainly the fault of humans. Fishing, viruses, human activities such as dam building and navigation, and climate change.

Why we are fascinated by eels

The eel tells us something about the curiosity of humankind, about our unquenchable need to seek the truth and understand where everything comes from and what it means. But also about our need for mystery. "Now there is much the eel can tell us about curiosity—rather more indeed than curiosity can inform us of the eel."

The eel's secretive side is also the secretive side of humans. And seeking your place in the world on your own: Surely that is, at the end of the day, the most universal of all human experiences?

The origin of the eel and its long journey are, despite their strangeness, things we might relate to, even recognize: its protracted drifting on the ocean currents in an effort to leave home, and its even longer and more difficult way back—the things we are prepared to go through to return home.

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