Eels, in Fact, That the Marsh Contained

An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World’s Most Amazing and Mysterious Fish James Prosek Thousands passed the lighthouse that night, on the first lap of a far sea journey—all the silver eels, in fact, that the marsh contained. And as they passed through the surf and out to sea, so also they passed from human sight and almost from human knowledge. — RACHEL CARSON, 1941 Contents Cover Title Page Introduction: A Transition in Mind to Eels chapter one: A Mysterious Fish chapter two: To the Sargasso chapter three: Eels in Maoridom chapter four: More Tales of Taniwha chapter five: The First Taste of Freshwater chapter six: Into the Ocean chapter seven: Where Eels Go to Die chapter eight: Eel Weir Hollow chapter nine: The Lasialap of U chapter ten: Obstacles in Their Path chapter eleven: Still in the Hunt Acknowledgments Also by James Prosek Copyright About the Publisher — Introduction — A TRANSITION In Mind to Eels My wall of eel spears he eel is not an easy fish to like. It doesn’t have the beauty of the trout or Tthe colors of the sunfish. As kids, my friends and I caught eels by accident while casting for something else. Unable to grip their muscular, slimy bodies, we stunned them with a smack on the riverbank, then pinned them down with our heels just long enough to remove our hooks from their mouths. We threw them back in the water and watched, astonished, as they swam away. Eels pulsed through my New England upbringing, there and then not there. Something about them made me curious even if I could not name it. My friend Joe Haines, an old game warden, used to cook them, big eels, trapped unwittingly as they tried to pass through the dam on the Saugatuck Reservoir on their fall migration to the sea. I asked Joe where the eels were going. The answer was always the same—the Sargasso Sea. But where was that? Far away. There was something mysterious in the idea that this fish, which swam in the waters where I waded barefoot in summer, was born thousands of miles away in the blue ocean. My mother told me that her earliest memory as a girl growing up in Trieste, Italy, was of seeing eels’ heads chopped off by the fishmonger in the markets. Why did the eel and the snake, these minimal creatures, make such lasting impressions on our psyches? I stumbled on eels in the photography of Cartier-Bresson, in the paintings of Manet and Leonardo (with orange slices in the Last Supper), in the novels of Günter Grass and Graham Swift. When I started fishing for striped bass we used them for bait, casting them off the beach on chill fall nights where surf spray mingled with stars, on Cuttyhunk Island and Martha’s Vineyard. At the time I had thought these strange travelers were unique to North America and Europe (the European eel also spawns in the Sargasso Sea). I had not known that there were other species of eels around the world that made migrations from the rivers of other continents to spawn in other oceans. A friend who’d lived in New Zealand told me that there were giant freshwater eels in the islands’ rivers and that these eels were important to the culture of the indigenous Maori—symbols of the movement of water, synonyms of the phallus, sacred guardians, and monster seducers. He said the Maori kept eels in ponds and fed them by hand, that these fish were known to live for hundreds of years and grow over six feet in length. A fish that once had been an accident on my hook had begun to wedge itself persistently in the crevices of my imagination—a thread that tied the ocean and the rivers together and made me feel like the world was held by one interconnected system of beauty, magic, and mystery. One day I stood at the edge of a lake in Tuscany with my friend and editor, Larry Ashmead, now retired from HarperCollins. We looked out across the surface of the water below a Tuscan hill town, and he asked me what the stakes in the mud were marking (the town was Cortona, the lake Trasimeno). I told him that they were traps for eels, fish that were born thousands of miles away in a warm eddy in the ocean called the Sargasso Sea. He said he didn’t believe me. When I got home there was a package with a photocopy of an essay by Rachel Carson on eels, and a note from Larry that said he thought the story of this fish might make a good book. Eels chapter one A MYSTERIOUS FISH Metamorphosis of eel larva to glass eel onjecture about what an eel is exactly, or where its place is in the tree of Clife, has racked the brains of more than a few naturalists. Its limbless elongated body led some to believe it was related to the snake. The Greek naturalist and poet Oppian wrote in the second century A.D.: “Nothing more is known, than what people repeat about the loves of Roman eels and snakes. Some say that they pair, that, full of eagerness, drunk with desire, the Roman eel comes out of the sea to go and meet her mate.” As late as 1833 Jerome V. C. Smith wrote in his Natural History of the Fishes of Massachusetts: “On the whole, we view the eel in the light of a water- serpent, being the connecting link between purely aquatic and amphibious reptiles.” The eel, however, is a fish, though it is a fish like no other. The freshwater eel, of the genus Anguilla, evolved more than fifty million years ago, giving rise to fifteen separate species. Most migratory fish, such as salmon and shad, are anadromous, spawning in freshwater and living their adult lives in salt water. The freshwater eel is one of the few fishes that does the opposite, spawning in the sea and spending its adulthood in lakes, rivers, and estuaries—a life history known as catadromy (in Greek ana- “means “up” and cata- means “down,” the prefixes suggesting the direction the fish migrates to reproduce).* But among catadromous fishes, the eel is the only one that travels to the depths of the oceans so far offshore. “Salmon,” Mike Miller, an eel scientist, told me, “can imprint on a river system. They are born in the river system, they go out in the ocean, and they come back to the same river—it’s not that bloody hard to do. In the case of the eel, you’re born in the open ocean. You can’t see anything around you except blue water. It’s just blue water until they come to the coastal areas, where they first enter estuaries and streams at random. And then, ten to thirty years later when they leave the river, they have to swim all the way out to the same place in the ocean again. And how do they do that?” The American and European freshwater eels (Anguilla rostrata and Anguilla anguilla) emerge from eggs suspended in the ocean—specifically, the western part of a subtropical gyre in the North Atlantic somewhere east of Bermuda called the Sargasso Sea.* The only reason scientists know this is that baby eels in their larval stage, called leptocephali, have been found drifting near the surface of the ocean thousands of miles from any shore. No one has ever been able to find a spawning adult or witness a freshwater eel spawning in the wild. For eel scientists, solving the mystery of eel reproduction remains a kind of holy grail. Wherever eels are born, they’re relentless in their effort to return to their oceanic womb. I can tell you this from personal experience because I’ve tried to keep them in a home aquarium. The morning after the first night of my attempt, I found eels slithering around the floor of my kitchen and living room. After securing a metal screen over the tank with heavy stones, I was able to contain them, but soon they were rubbing themselves raw against the screen. Then one died trying to escape via the filter outflow. When I screened the outflow, they banged their heads against the glass until they had what appeared to be seizures and died. That’s when I stopped trying to keep eels. Eels are wondrous in their ability to move. They’re often found in lakes, ponds, and postholes with no visible connection to the sea, leaving the inquisitive shaking their heads. On wet nights, eels are known to cross over land from a pond to a river, or over an obstruction, by the thousands, using each other’s moist bodies as a bridge. Young eels can climb moss-covered vertical walls, forming a braid with their bodies. Farmers in Normandy say that eels will leave rivers on spring nights and find their way to vegetable patches to feed on peas. The yearly journeys millions of adult eels make from rivers to oceans must be among the greatest unseen migrations of any creature on the planet. In the course of these journeys, which span thousands of miles, eels face a long list of dangers: hydroelectric dams, river diversions, pollution, disease, predation (by striped bass, beluga whales, and cormorants, among others), fishing by humans, and changes in ocean currents or temperature structure due to global warming, which may confound eels during their migrations. From Aristotle through Pliny, Walton, and Linnaeus, great naturalists through time have put forward various theories as to how eels make new eels—that the young emerged from the mud (Aristotle); that eels are bred from a particular dew that falls in the months of May and June (Walton); that they multiplied by rubbing themselves against rocks (Pliny); that they were viviparous, bearing live young rather than laying eggs (Linnaeus).

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