Eel

Freshwater eels have traversed the centuries as riddles of nature. They up rivers and estuaries throughout the ancient, medieval and early modern eras. Still, no one knew where they came from or understood much about them. One myth had them self-generating from mud. Even as they gobbled them in quantities – jellying them in what is now UK territory, or braising them with a butter-and-wine sauce matelote in France – Europeans remained baffled by eels’ slithery undulations, their general whence and whither, and their seemingly elastic lifespans. Before he turned his attention to the human psyche, a young Sigmund Freud spent weeks looking – in vain, as it turned out – for eel testicles. He dissected hundreds of the animals in the port of Trieste: how eels reproduced, in the absence of observable eggs or sexual organs, was a compulsive mind-twister.

We now know – or believe with a high degree of confidence – that European eels (Anguilla anguilla) come to life in the Sargasso Sea, the strangely self-contained expanse of water at the intersection of the Atlantic and the Caribbean. Their bodies transform throughout their lives as, over many years, they migrate to continental rivers and lakes, first as larvae, then as translucent “glass eels” (or elvers), then snake-like and opaque in appearance, before they return to the Sargasso Sea, their stomachs dissolving in the process, their sexual organs belatedly blooming, to spawn and, this final feat accomplished, to die.

The American eel (Anguilla rostrata) also breeds in the Sargasso Sea; other species, including the Japanese eel (Anguilla japonica), have been shown to breed at a small number of locations in the Pacific and Indian oceans – off the Northern Mariana Islands, Tonga or Madagascar. But aspects of eel biography continue to elude us. In his learned romp through marine facts and trivia, Eloquence of the Sardine, the physicist and sea enthusiast Bill François recounts the story of Åle, an eel dropped in a well in the Swedish village of Brantevik in 1859. (The practice was apparently not uncommon: eels ate insects and kept the household water parasite-free.) The animal lived until 2014, its longevity likely connected to its inability to reverse-migrate and spawn – dying, it is thought, as the water in the well overheated. Åle, in other words, was accidentally cooked to death at the age of 155. Had he not been, he might yet have outlived us – and, who knows, subsequent generations too.

Europe is littered with toponyms referencing the eel, from the fishing port of Ålesund in Norway to the Italian lakeside town of Anguillara. One particularly erudite FAO staff member, who’s been studying the connection between fish and heraldry, points out that Anguillara was the fief of the Orsini family, to whom a number of popes belonged: their coat of arms, still visible on buildings around Rome, prominently features the eel. Our colleague also recalls the fate visited on one pope in Dante’s Divina Commedia: the Holy Father winds up in Purgatory because of his gluttony for eels and Tuscan wine.

While overindulgence in Tuscan wine remains a distinct possibility, such gluttony would be far harder to keep up when it comes to eels. The last couple of centuries (and the closing decades of the last one in particular) have seen a drastic drop in eel stocks as counted by the numbers reaching European shores. At barely one-twentieth of historical records, the fish is critically endangered. It’s unclear if this drying-up – once so inconceivable that, legend has it, some of the catch was fed to pigs – is down to sheer overfishing, to climate change, to some parasite, or to factors yet unknown. The multiplication of dams, which disrupt Europe’s “fluvial continuum”, has certainly not helped.

The decline, thankfully, appears to have been slowed if not halted. In 2009, the European Union’s Eel Regulation kicked in, with strong protections and export bans. A slight increase in numbers could soon be observed – although a stubborn black market endures. Elsewhere, the East Asia Eel Society, a regional grouping of marine scientists, is seeking to weigh in on resource management policies: there too, eel arrivals have greatly shrunk since about 1980. The society’s founder, Katsumi Tsukamoto of Japan, is probably the world’s foremost authority on freshwater eels: he was the first to collect Anguilla japonica’s eggs in the wild and locate, in the process, the spawning grounds of the fish known to the Japanese as unagi. With his country the world’s largest eel consumer, Tsukamoto has been speaking up for conservation measures and moderating demand.