Slippery things, eels. The sliminess of their skin, according to one Victorian wag, makes them as difficult to grasp as a pig “which has been well soaped.” This physical elusiveness is, of course, metaphor for the trickiness of pinning down the biology of the European eel. It is a fish that looks like a snake; stranger still, in its larval stage, as Tom Fort notes in his updated paeon to the eel, it most resembles an amoeboid, being “a flat transparent creature with a body shaped like a willow leaf and a tiny head with round black eyes and a pair of jaws armed with a few jagged teeth.” Eels metamorphose.
Fort, former Fishing Correspondent for the Financial Times, is a confirmed anguillophiliac. Which is reasonable. Eels are extraordinary things, seemingly put in the waters to make us wonder, and remember the continents of mysteries still left unsolved. They can slither headless. They also have the startling, un-fishy ability to travel overland. And they can live for an extraordinary length of time: an eel kept as a pet in Sweden — the creature was even given a name, Putte — turned silver belly up in 1948, at an estimated 88 years of age.
For millennia, the eel’s life cycle baffled humans. Aristotle believed that eels emerged from “the entrails of the earth,” while Pliny the Elder, usually a fairly sober scientist, concluded that eels replicated by rubbing their bodies against rocks, and “from the shreds of skin thus detached come new ones.” It would be easy to scoff, except that the fantastic truth of eel reproduction was only fully proven in 1921. “In so far that a story about a fish can have a human hero,” Fort writes “it is the Danish scientist Johannes Schmidt.” Sailing the Sargasso Sea, at 26°N, 54°W, aboard the good ship Dana, Schmidt finally discovered the species’ breeding grounds, ending millennia of speculation.
Eels spawn in the Sargasso wastes of the Atlantic, then the offspring — elvers, or ‘thin heads’ — drift with the current to Europe, where they become a freshwater species (another metamorphosis). They snout their way up estuaries and rivers; live 10, 20 years — or 80 if kept in a tank and fed by Swedes — then return to the ancestral spawning site one dark night, under some deus ex machina prompt. There, they mate in a giant, thrashing orgy, only to die and sink three miles down to the ocean floor. In this dark graveyard, their million macabre corpses are finally scavenged by the lowest form of marine life, holothuria, a creature that “breathes through its anus.”
Schmidt may have discovered the breeding grounds of Anguillia anguillia, but to this day no-one is sure how mature eels navigate the thousands of watery miles to their birthplace. As Seamus Heaney so memorably versed the riddle of eel migration:
Who knows now if she knows
Her depth and direction
She’s passed Malin and
Tory, silent, wakeless,
A wisp, a wick that is
Its own taper and light
Through the weltering dark
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