The Book of Eels

by Patrik Svensson

  Yet even so, it would be a long time before the questions about the eel began to find answers. Aristotle had strongly argued against the theory that the eel was viviparous, but it now grew more popular. It was advocated by, among others, the English author Izaak Walton, who in 1653 published the world’s first commercially successful book on fishing, The Compleat Angler. The eel, he claimed, is viviparous and gives birth to live young, but it is also sexless. New eels were generated inside older ones without conception.

  Then the Italian physician and scientist Francesco Redi, of Pisa, published the first evidence-based critique of the concept of spontaneous generation. In 1668, his experiments on flies demonstrated that eggs and fertilization are required to create life. Omne vivum ex ovo, he concluded. All life stems from the egg. He also studied eels and managed to show that the tiny wormlike creatures sometimes found inside eels, which some had taken to be unborn young, were in fact more likely parasites. The eel was in all probability not viviparous, Redi wrote, though he never did manage to find any reproductive organs or eggs and was therefore unable to give a definitive answer to the question of how the animal really reproduces.

  It was in this context that a sensation landed on a table at the University of Padua in Italy. The year was 1707, and a surgeon by the name of Sancassini had visited an eel fishery in Comacchio on Italy’s east coast. There he had spotted an eel so big and fat, he had felt compelled to pick up his scalpel and cut it open. Inside the eel, he had found something that looked very much like reproductive organs, and something that resembled eggs.

  He sent the dissected eel to his friend Antonio Vallisneri, a professor of natural history in Padua. Vallisneri, a sworn enemy of the notion that life can spring from nothing, was justifiably excited and sent the eel on to the University of Bologna, where many of the most prominent scientists of his day were to be found.

  The Comacchio eel breathed new life into the question of the eel’s reproduction, the solving of which for a while became the central object of scientific efforts during the Enlightenment. The eel itself was not, however, as well received as Vallisneri had hoped. What had really been found, after all? Granted, it might look like reproductive organs and eggs, but how could anyone know for sure? In order to consider something proved, systematic observation and further study were required; instead of enlightenment, the eel prompted a moderate flare-up in academic debate. A renowned anatomy professor, Antonio Maria Valsalva, was of the opinion that what Vallisneri wanted to call reproductive organs and eggs were in all likeliness common, unsensational fatty tissue. Someone else claimed it was probably a collapsed swim bladder. The doubts provoked squabbling within the scientific community. A professor by the name of Pietro Molinelli offered a reward to anyone who could produce an eel with verifiable eggs inside. He did receive one promising specimen, until it was discovered that the fisherman who had provided the eel in the hopes of pocketing the reward had crammed it full of roe from a completely different species of fish.

  And so the Comacchio eel became something of an academic legend—but the eel question remained unanswered. What had in fact been found was never fully agreed on. And in Sweden, Carl Linnaeus, who in 1758 gave the European eel its scientific name, came to the perhaps more convenient conclusion that the eel probably gives birth to live young.

  It would take seventy more years after Vallisneri’s insight before there was another breakthrough in the eel question. In an almost uncanny instance of repetition, another eel, also caught near Comacchio, ended up on a table at the University of Bologna. This time, the table belonged to Carlo Mondini, a professor of anatomy who would later become famous for his description and naming of a deformity in the human ear that causes deafness. Mondini examined the eel and wrote a now classic treatise, in which the reproductive organs and eggs of a sexually mature female eel were for the first time described with a measure of scientific accuracy. The original Comacchio eel, the one Antonio Vallisneri had sent to Bologna seventy years prior, had, according to Mondini, been misunderstood. By comparing his own findings with those of his predecessors, he was able to establish that what had been found in that eel could with some degree of certainty be said to be a collapsed swim bladder. But this new eel was the real thing. The folds inside it really were its reproductive organs, and the tiny droplet-shaped objects inside really were eggs.

  It was 1777, and the question of what the eel is could finally be said to have been provisionally answered. If eels could possess reproductive organs, and be shown to produce eggs, at least that demonstrated they weren’t the products of spontaneous generation. The eel still remained a mystery in many respects, but at least a mystery with a degree of anchoring in the observable, describable world. Mondini’s discovery brought eels and humans a little bit closer. Now all that was missing was the second half of the equation.

  4

  Looking into the Eyes of an Eel

  My father liked eel fishing for several reasons. I don’t know which was the most important.

  What I do know is that he liked it down by the stream. He liked the magical, overgrown environment, the quietly rushing water, the willow tree, and the bats. It was only a few hundred yards from his childhood home, a farm with a main house and stables from which a narrow gravel path led down the gentle slope toward the stream. My father had run up and down that path as a child, to go fishing or swimming. The stream had constituted the metaphorical outer limit of his world. He had crept through the tall grass by the water’s edge, catching live mice, which he’d put in his pocket and bring home to use for slingshot target practice in the yard. He had skated on the frozen overflows in the winter. In the summer, he had been able to hear the sound of the rapids when he was kneeling in the fields, thinning beets or picking potatoes.

  The stream represented his roots, everything familiar he always returned to. But the eels moving through its depths, occasionally revealing themselves to us, represented something else entirely. They were, if anything, a reminder of how little a person can really know, about eels or other people, about where you come from and where you’re going.

  I also know Dad liked eating eel. In the summer, when there had been a lot of fishing, he would happily have eel several times a week. He would usually eat it with potatoes and melted butter. Mum did the cooking, taking the skinned, cleaned eel we provided and cutting it up into four-inch pieces that she breaded and fried in butter with a pinch of salt and pepper. I liked to watch. Every time she placed the fish in the hot pan, something incredible happened. The bits of eel moved. They twitched spasmodically in the searing heat. As though there were still life left in them.

  I would stand next to my mother and watch in wonder. A body that had just been alive but was now dead, cut into pieces even. And yet, it moved! If death meant motionlessness, could it really be said that the eel was dead? If death robs us of the ability to feel, how come the eel could still feel the heat in the pan? There was no heart beating, but there was some kind of life in it. I wondered where to draw the line between life and death.

  Later on, I read that octopuses have myriad nerve endings in their limbs. There are in fact more nerve cells in an octopus’s limbs than in its brain, and each prehensile arm is also a nerve center, independent of the central brain in the animal’s head. It’s as though octopuses have small but autonomous brains at the end of each arm—which is to say that each one can act of its own volition. An octopus can, for example, both taste and feel with its arms, and some species even have photosensitive cells in their limbs, which give them some degree of vision. But what’s more; if you cut off an octopus’s arm, it doesn’t just continue to move, it acts almost like an independent creature. Throw it a piece of food and it will seize it and try to feed the head to which it’s no longer attached.

  I’d seen similar behavior in eels. I had cut one’s head off and watched the rest of the body slither away as though trying to save itself. It continued to move for minutes without a head. To the eel, death seemed relative.


  For my part, I ate eel only if I had to, not because I felt sorry for them but because I didn’t like the taste. The greasy, slightly gamey flavor made me nauseated. But Dad loved eel. He ate it with his hands, gnawing the bones clean and licking the grease off his fingers. “So fatty and tasty,” he’d say. If he didn’t eat the eel fried, he ate it boiled. The same four-inch pieces were placed in a pot of salted water with allspice and bay leaves. The meat turned completely white with an oily slickness to it. I liked boiled eel even less than fried.

  I didn’t, however, mind taking care of the fish we’d caught. When we returned from the stream in the early morning, we brought the eels in that black bucket full of stream water. We filled an even bigger bucket with clean water and transferred the eels. Then we let them sit there for a few hours, sometimes all day. We might change the water at some point.

  I would often go outside to have a look at them. My mother ran a day care center, so our house was full of children; I used to take them out to the garage, where the bucket was. I’d poke the eels, trying to make them swim around. I’d demonstrate how to hold them, with your index and middle finger on both sides of the body and your thumb like a hook underneath. I’d pick the eels up and let them writhe and flex in the air. They could lie completely motionless in the bucket, as though dead or paralyzed, but as soon as I picked one up, it would become suddenly violently powerful, wrapping itself around my arm. I’d reek of eel slime. I never let the other children touch the eels.

  As evening came on, we’d kill the eels, a brutal spectacle. Dad would pick up an eel and hold it down against a table, grab his fishing knife, and ram the sharp point straight through its head. The eel would writhe in rapid convulsions, tensing its body as though it were one big muscle. When it calmed down a little, Dad would pull the knife out and put the eel on a three-foot-long wooden board. He’d secure it to the board with a five-inch nail hammered through its head so the eel hung suspended as if on a crucifix. With his knife, he would then make an incision, all the way around the body, right below the head.

  “Let’s take off its pajamas,” Dad would say and hand me a pair of pliers. I’d get a firm grip on the edge and pull the skin off in one long, fluid motion. It was blueish on the inside. Like a child’s pajamas. Sometimes the body would still be undulating slowly, sluggishly.

  We opened the eel and cleaned out the innards, cut the head off, and then it was done. If it was a big eel, we sometimes weighed it, but they were almost always roughly the same size, between one and two pounds. The girth and color would vary slightly; some were paler and others a darker yellowish-brown, but on the whole, they looked remarkably alike. In all the years we fished for eels, we never caught one that weighed more than a little over two pounds. Granted, we considered that gigantic, but we also knew there were supposedly eels that weighed as much as four or five. These were the eels my father dreamed of. He’d read in the paper about an amateur fisherman transforming himself into an expert at catching big eels.

  “He’ll sit by the stream for three days straight,” my dad told me. “Day and night. He just sits there, waiting. He can sit for three days without anything happening. And then suddenly, there it is. A four-pound eel!”

  Patience was apparently the first prerequisite. You had to give the eel your time. We thought of it in terms of a transaction.

  We also tried different kinds of bait. We put frozen shrimp on the hook. We tried plump slugs and beetles. Nothing worked much better than anything else. Once we found a dead frog in the grass by the stream. It was thick and shiny; we might have accidentally stepped on it. Dad put it on the hook and threw it in, but the next morning it was gone and the hook clean. So we went back to worms and kept working on our investment. One day, the big eel would come.

  It never did, which only contributed to the eel’s mystique. I think it was what made my dad an eel fisher. He was always telling me about glass eels, yellow eels, and silver eels, about how they changed shape, about eels older than any human, eels living in cramped, dark wells. He told me about their long journey across the Atlantic, back to their birthplace, a place far beyond anything I knew or could even imagine, about how they navigated using the movements of the moon, or maybe it was the sun, and about how every eel for some unfathomable reason simply knew where to go. How could they be so sure about something like that? How could anyone feel such overwhelming conviction about the path he or she had chosen?

  When dad talked about the Sargasso Sea, it sounded like a magical fairy-tale world. Or like the end of the world. I pictured mile after mile of open sea that suddenly turned into a blanket of seaweed teeming with life and movement and eels writhing around one another and dying and sinking to the ocean floor while tiny see-through willow leaves floated up toward the light and let the invisible current take them. Every time we caught an eel, I looked into its eyes, trying to catch a glimpse of what it had seen. None of them ever met my gaze.

  5

  Sigmund Freud and the Eels of Trieste

  How much can you ever really know about an eel? Or about a person? It turns out the two questions are related.

  Sigmund Freud was nineteen when, in 1876, he picked up the gauntlet thrown by Aristotle more than two thousand years previously, which had been picked up in vain by others so many times before. He was the person destined to find the holy grail of natural science: the testicles of the eel.

  Freud was born in 1856 in Freiberg in Moravia (now Příbor in the Czech Republic), but his family moved to Vienna before his fourth birthday. Even as a child, he was an excellent student, with an interest in literature and a remarkable talent for language; he enrolled at a university in Vienna when he was seventeen. Freud was primarily a medical student, but he also studied philosophy, physiology, and zoology under the renowned professor Carl Claus.

  Claus specialized in marine zoology, was a fervent Darwinist and a leading expert in crustaceans, and like everyone in his field, he had an interest in eels. He had conducted research on hermaphroditic animals, of which the eel was still popularly believed to be one, and in addition to his professorship at the University of Vienna, he was also the head of a marine research station in Trieste.

  During the first half of the nineteenth century, the eel question had lain dormant. Since Carlo Mondini had found and provided a plausible description of the reproductive organs of the female eel, it seemed it would simply be a matter of time before the male organs were found and identified also. And once they had been so located, the intractable mystery of the eels’ procreation would be solved.

  That being said, a lot of people were unconvinced by Mondini’s discovery. One skeptic was the Italian scientist Lazzaro Spallanzani, who would eventually go down in history as the person who successfully dismissed spontaneous generation. Spallanzani traveled to Comacchio himself to investigate Mondini’s findings and dismissed them as improbable. It was, of course, also a matter of prestige. So many prominent researchers had tried for so long to explain and describe the organs responsible for and the method of the eel’s reproduction. Why had no one else succeeded? One single eel with reproductive organs and roe after all those years? Why couldn’t any more be found? No, Mondini’s eel seemed unique. It seemed implausible. And besides, sometimes, objective probability is less important than what people want to believe. In the scientific world, a lot of people simply didn’t want to believe in Carlo Mondini’s eel.

  In Germany, the search for the eel’s reproductive organs became, for a while, a popular spectacle. A reward of fifty marks was offered to any person who could find an eel carrying roe. Newspapers all over the country wrote about it. The eels were to be sent to a certain professor Rudolf Virchow, who would conduct a careful examination of each one; the German fishing authorities had agreed to pay the postage. The fanfare and the generous award resulted in a large number of eels being packaged and posted. Hundreds of eels from every part of Germany—half-eaten eels, rotting eels, eels crawling with parasites. The packages flowed in at such a rat
e that the fishing authority almost went bankrupt. And still, no sexually mature eel with roe was found.

  It was only in 1824 that Martin Rathke, a German professor of anatomy, was able to find and adequately describe a female eel with fully developed reproductive organs, independent of Carlo Mondini. In 1850, Rathke also found an eel with fully developed eggs inside. It turned out Mondini had probably been right all along; his description of the reproductive organs tallied with Rathke’s, but the eggs in Mondini’s eel had been much smaller, as they were less fully developed.

  With the first half of the biological equation verified, the hunt for the second part, the mythical testicles, could begin in earnest. But it was slow going at the outset. Many researchers still chose to believe that eels were hermaphroditic. The fatty tissue found adjacent to the reproductive organs in the mature females was in fact probably the male organs. How else could the answer to the mystery have eluded science for so long?

  Laypeople by and large also preferred to cling to older, slightly more fanciful theories. In 1862, an amateur researcher, David Cairncross, published a book entitled The Origin of the Silver Eel, in which he revived an old belief held by Sicilian fishermen that the eel’s first manifestation was in fact a beetle, and that its past as an insect was proved by its ability to get by equally well on dry land and in water.

  Almost one hundred years after Carlo Mondini’s discovery, in 1874, a Polish zoologist, Szymon Syrski, announced that he and his colleagues at the natural historical museum in Trieste at last had found something that might be a mature male eel. Inside it, he had located a small, lobe-shaped organ that differed from the descriptions provided by Mondini and Rathke. It might, in fact, be the long-sought eel testicle. But since Syrski was unable to sufficiently describe the organ and prove it really did produce semen, nothing was certain. The scientific community required additional observations.