The American eel and the European eel are two different species, but they are very much alike. So every eel we might see in a river or pond in America or Europe has come from the Sargasso Sea?Įxactly. Eels don’t develop their sexual organs until they are on the way back to the Sargasso Sea in just the last year of their life. Carl Linnaeus came to the same conclusion as Aristotle-that they don’t breed and that there are no sexual differences between males and females. He thought that the eel just came to life out of nothing, from the mud in the rivers and the seas. And he came to the conclusion that eels don’t breed at all. But when he dissected them he couldn’t find any sexual organs. Aristotle studied the eel and tried to explain how they breed. No one has ever seen it because all eels breed in the Sargasso Sea, a region in the Atlantic Ocean, and only there. To this day, no person has ever seen eels mate? They couldn’t tell whether there were male and female eels.īecause no human being has ever seen eels breed, so to explain how they do it was an extremely hard question.Īt one point, instead of eating, eels develop sexual organs. Does it have sexual differences? Are there males and females?įor centuries, no one could actually find any sexual organs. From the beginning, it was, What is the eel? Is it a fish or something else? And then it had a lot to do with its sexuality. But the eel question has been different things over the years. And it’s been such a big issue in natural science that the term “the eel question” refers to an especially hard mystery to solve. The eel has a very special scientific history. I reached Svensson at his home in Malmo, Sweden. A blend of natural history and memoir, the book is a beguiling chronicle of the many people who’ve tried to uncover the eel’s secrets. Svensson, a soft-spoken journalist with a keen sense of wonder and a taste for philosophical musings, writes about his long fascination with this strange animal in The Book of Eels. If the story is true, it has lived for over 150 years in complete darkness.” Emil Malmborg It was bleak and small, but had enormous eyes.
#BOY CATCHES FLESH WATER EEL TV#
A couple of years ago, a TV crew went to the well and found the eel. “A boy caught an eel in the 1850s and put it in a well. There’s a famous eel story in Sweden, he says. EYES OF THE EEL: Patrik Svensson (above) has been fascinated by eels since he was a child in Sweden. Or even whether the eel was a fish or some kind of water snake. Or how they managed to transform from saltwater to freshwater animals and then back to saltwater “silver eels” at the end of their lives. Or whether there were actually male and female eels. No one could figure out how-or where-they reproduced. The eel is one of the most mysterious creatures on Earth, and for centuries it confounded scientists, from Aristotle to Freud. And he’s far from alone in his obsession. That’s just one of the many questions that haunted Svensson for decades. “It made me think, what’s really the difference between life and death?” “I always found it fascinating and a little scary,” he says. Back home, Patrik’s mother would toss their catch in the frying pan, but the eels still squirmed and wriggled even after they were chopped up, with no heads. “It was what me and my father did together. They barely talked as they set their fishing lines along the bank. It was a magical place, surrounded by willow trees, with bats swooping through the moonlight. On summer nights his father would take him down to a small stream near their home in Sweden. Fishing for eels was a primal childhood experience for Patrik Svensson.