The Book of Eels

by Patrik Svensson

  When it comes to the question of procreation—where and how it happens—the Japanese eel was long an even bigger mystery than the European one. Scientists were able to pinpoint its spawning ground only in 1991. Employing the same method and dedication as Johannes Schmidt, though not taking quite as long, the Japanese marine biologist Katsumi Tsukamoto sailed around the sea with nets and instruments, searching for increasingly minute leptocephalus larvae. One autumn evening in 1991, he finally managed to find specimens that were only days, or perhaps hours, old. It was far out in the Pacific Ocean, just west of the Mariana Islands.

  After this discovery, it wasn’t long before an even more sensational discovery was made. In the autumn of 2008, a research team from the Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute in Tokyo actually managed to catch fully grown Japanese eels in exactly the area west of the Mariana Islands where the findings situated the breeding area. One male and two females were caught. All three had already spawned and were in bad shape. They died shortly thereafter. But this meant the Asian version of the holy grail of science had at long last been found.

  But what did that mean? According to at least one member of the expedition, Michael Miller, nothing, really. It didn’t prove anything we didn’t already know. We already know approximately where they breed. But we still don’t know exactly where, how they get there, or how many of them are successful. We still haven’t seen them procreate. We don’t know why. Why, why?

  MYSTERIES HAVE AN ALLURE OF THEIR OWN, BUT THERE ARE SOME things that suggest the timeless eel question will eventually be answered. Not only have silver eels been found after breeding in the Pacific, but researchers there have also pulled off what no one has managed with the European or American eel. They have successful bred the Japanese eel, Anguilla japonica, in captivity. As early as 1973, scientists working at the University of Hokkaido were able to extract eggs from sexually mature female eels, inseminate them artificially, and have them hatch and become larvae. The future of the threatened eel was not their primary concern; the venture had rather narrower economic motivations. The eel is vastly popular on Japanese dinner tables and the subject of a multimillion dollar industry. If it could be farmed, the way salmon is, for instance, it would mean a lot more eel at a fraction of the cost. Consequently, the market is prepared to invest large sums in research that could make farming possible.

  Unsurprisingly, the eel has not, however, proved particularly cooperative. The sensational artificially produced little willow leaves at the University of Hokkaido barely had time to hatch and register the lack of ocean currents in their tank before they died. The leptocephalus larvae simply refused to eat. It didn’t matter what the Japanese researchers tried to tempt the transparent little creatures with. The willow leaves went on hunger strike and invariably perished.

  For years after that, and over many generations of artificially created but all equally short-lived leptocephalus larvae, Japanese scientists dedicated themselves to finding out how to keep newly hatched eel larvae alive. What do they eat? No one knew. Their feeding habits had never been observed in the wild. A range of foods were offered. Plankton, roe from other fish, microscopic rotifers, parts of octopuses, jellyfish, shrimp, and clams. The tiny larvae stubbornly refused sustenance in each successive attempt and predictably died soon after hatching.

  It took the scientists close to thirty years to come up with a meal the larvae could stomach. It consisted of a powder made of freeze-dried shark eggs; armed with this, they managed to keep a handful of larvae alive for all of eighteen days in 2001. It was a sensational new record, but they were still, of course, very far from finding the answer to how to coax the transparent willow leaves into transforming into fully grown, edible eels in captivity.

  Furthermore, the eels continued to be difficult in other ways. Even though the researchers were now able to make them eat—the prescribed diet was refined over time until at least some specimens survived into the glass eel stage—most still died within a few days of hatching. Only 4 percent of the larvae lasted for fifty days, and only 1 percent for a hundred. The number that reached the size necessary to turn into glass eels was almost zero.

  Moreover, the laboratory eels behaved differently than their peers in the sea. The captured females produced significantly fewer eggs in captivity than in the wild. It also soon became clear that all the eels hatched in the laboratory were male. No one knew why, but to remedy it, glass eels were injected with estrogen to artificially produce females. In 2010, Japanese scientists succeeded for the first time in completing the life cycle of the eels when they produced eggs, and in time leptocephalus larvae, from eels that had themselves been created in the laboratory. The eels were also given hormones to make them grow faster, which lead to severe deformities in their offspring: willow leaves that didn’t look anything like the ones caught in the sea, their heads strangely misshapen, and the animals themselves unable to swim. It was as though the eel were refusing to let anyone else control its creation. As though its existence was its own business.

  As of this writing, scientists are working hard to find the correct methods, if they even exist, to farm eels, which would be important not only to the Japanese eel industry but also, by extension, to the survival of the eel globally. They are nowhere near succeeding. But every year brings new technologies, new scientific insights and innovations, and for anyone interested in understanding the eel, there is—all the obvious problems notwithstanding—reason for hope. Perhaps some kind of tracking device will be developed in the not-too-distant future that’s small and light enough to follow a silver eel all the way to its breeding grounds in the Sargasso Sea. Perhaps that will allow us to pinpoint more precisely where on the map reproduction takes place, and perhaps once enough eels have been tracked, we can confirm or reject the idea of multiple breeding grounds. Perhaps by then, we will also have a better understanding of what stops or impedes the eel on its journey back to its birthplace. Perhaps we can even do something about it. Perhaps European and American researchers will, like their Japanese colleagues, manage to fertilize eggs from European and American eels and hatch them in captivity. Perhaps one day, these cultivated eels will survive and grow big and healthy enough to be eaten. Or, of course, to be released into the wild.

  A scientifically minded optimist would say it’s just a matter of time. With a focused will and enough time, science will find a way to solve every riddle. The eel question has endured in various guises over millennia, but experience tells us we will find the answer, sooner or later. We just need enough time.

  The problem, though, is that time is about to run out.

  16

  Becoming a Fool

  I remember Nana on the lawn. With her head slightly bowed and her arms raised in front of her. She was holding a branch broken off the apple tree next to her. It was the first time I saw a dowsing rod.

  She slowly walked across the grass, away from the tree, turned left and then right, searchingly, as though every step was a step into the unknown. Her eyes were vacant, as though she wasn’t even aware that we were standing there watching.

  Suddenly, she stopped; her arms twitched and were pulled down toward the grass. The rod seemed to tug at her, hard and violently, as though trying to wrest free of her grasp. And Nana looked up and laughed and said: “I can’t explain it. It’s not me doing it. I’m not even moving.”

  Dad shook his head, walked over to her and grabbed the tree branch with one hand. Then they held it together while they slowly walked around, side by side, in a circle on the grass, like a slow, peculiar dance; when they got back to that spot, they stopped, and Nana’s arms were once again pulled violently downward. Dad looked up and laughed, too, while the branch was still moving.

  “I can barely hold it,” Dad said.

  When he let go, Nana stopped moving. She held the branch up in front of her and looked at it in wonder.

  “I can’t explain it. But I can feel it. It’s pulling all by itself.”

  “I just don
’t get it,” Dad said.

  One night by the stream, Dad put the bucket with our fishing gear down and broke a Y-shaped branch off the willow tree. He pulled off all the twigs and leaves and held it up in front of him.

  “Should we try?”

  I nodded, a little nervous, and watched him walk off slowly, in his orange waders and big, bulky wellies. He walked carefully and slightly bowlegged along the stream, away from me through the wet, somewhat unyielding grass. When he turned around and looked at me, he was a silhouette in the evening sun; I saw him holding the branch out in front of him, tentatively and almost reluctantly, as though it were leading him toward something he didn’t quite know whether he wanted to meet. He walked all the way back to me without anything happening, and when he reached me, he stopped, tossed the branch aside, and shook his head.

  “No, nothing. I guess I don’t have the gift.”

  What neither Dad nor I knew then was that there’s a simple explanation as to why a dowsing rod moves. The explanation has, in fact, been known for more than a hundred and fifty years. Numerous scientific experiments have been conducted to test the dowsing rod’s ability to locate things such as water, oil, or metal underground. Virtually all of them have shown that it simply doesn’t work. A tree branch is incapable of conveying any information whatsoever about what exists or doesn’t exist underground.

  And yet, it moves. Sometimes, evidently, without the person holding it deliberately trying to affect it. The explanation is what’s called the ideomotor phenomenon. What happens is that a type of minute muscle movement is executed without the conscious intent of the person in question. Rather than deliberate acts, these movements are the expression of an idea, a feeling, or a perception. It’s sometimes called the Carpenter effect, after the English physiologist William B. Carpenter, who first described the phenomenon in 1852, and it’s the exact same phenomenon that, for example, moves the planchette on a Ouija board.

  In other words, a person holding a dowsing rod unconsciously causes it to strike the ground through tiny, barely perceptible movements. But for it to work, the person has to have an idea or preconceived notion, an unconscious will leading him or her to a certain spot. Not necessarily the right spot, whether the goal is to find water or metals, but to a specific spot nonetheless. What does the unconscious find there, when the branch tugs our hands down toward the ground? Why do the muscles move in one spot but not others?

  The ideomotoric effect cannot explain this, of course. Maybe it depends on our subtle sensory impressions. Maybe we subconsciously read our surroundings and come to conclusions we don’t even understand ourselves. Either way, we’re making these same unconscious decisions continuously.

  Perhaps, after all, it’s just chance that tells us when it is time to move a muscle. When it is time to stay, or when it is time to leave.

  NANA BELIEVED IN GOD.

  “He’s big,” she’d tell me. “Much bigger than anyone you can imagine.”

  “Is he bigger than grandad?” I asked.

  “Much bigger!”

  She didn’t go to church, but she believed in God. In Jesus and the Immaculate Conception and the resurrection. And a life after death in which she would meet her mother and father and eventually her older siblings and her husband. And in the end, her son. She believed in gnomes, too. She’d seen one when she was about fifteen and working as a maid. She’d been walking home late one night along a tree-lined gravel road and suddenly, he’d been walking there next to her on the verge. A gnome. Dressed in gray. Barely three feet tall. She’d been with a friend who’d seen him, too. For a while, the little creature had walked beside them, then he’d vanished.

  I wasn’t a believer. I went to the children’s group in our local church but was kicked out because I couldn’t sit still, and when we attended church with school, I raised my hand and asked the priest: “Who on earth made all this up?”

  Dad wasn’t a believer either. He’d been to school and learned about the Swedish kings of yore and the gospel, but he had a hard time with authority. He believed in neither gnomes nor God.

  It was only where the eel was concerned that we had our doubts.

  Once, when we checked our spillers in the morning, we found we’d caught only one lousy eel. Granted, it was fairly large, almost two pounds, grayish-yellow and broad headed. We put it in a bucket of water in the garage as usual.

  That afternoon, I went out to change the water and discovered the eel was gone. The bucket was tall and white and filled with water to a point about ten inches below the rim; the eel had been hovering near the bottom, pumping its gills the last time I checked on it. Now it was gone. The bucket was still upright and full of water, but no eel.

  I didn’t know what to think. At first, I figured it had managed to heave itself out of captivity and slither away. But the garage door had been closed and there was no sign of it; the eel had seemingly vanished without a trace. Had Dad cleaned it already? Without me? It didn’t sound likely, but he wasn’t home and wasn’t expected back all day. Maybe he’d taken care of the eel before he left after all.

  When Dad got back that night, I met him at the car.

  “Did you take the eel?”

  “The eel? It’s in the bucket, isn’t it?”

  “No, it’s gone. Someone must’ve taken it.”

  We went into the garage and stood there for a minute, staring at the empty bucket. Dad confirmed the eel really wasn’t there.

  “But I don’t think anyone would take an eel,” he said. “It seems an odd thing to steal. I think it escaped. It must be around here somewhere.”

  We searched the entire garage. It was dirty and full of stuff. Wooden boards, ladders, tools, plastic crates, shovels, pitchforks, rakes, buckets, potato crates, and fishing gear. We moved everything, examining every nook and cranny.

  We finally found the eel in a corner, behind a pair of wellies. It lay completely still, covered in dust and gravel. I picked it up; its body was cold and limp, its skin dry and rough from the gravel. It drooped like a dirty sock in my hand; its eyes were flat and lifeless.

  It was clearly dead. It had been out of the water for at least five or six hours. Maybe more.

  “Put it in the bucket; I’ll see to it later,” Dad said.

  I dropped it into the water and stood there studying it for a while. At first, it floated on the surface, its pale belly facing up. Then it suddenly turned over. Its body writhed and its head swung from side to side and slowly, slowly, it started swimming around the bucket, its gills opening and closing.

  I’d seen this before. Early one morning by the stream, while it was still dark out, we’d trudged down the bank to a spiller set on a small ledge, maybe three feet above the water. On the line running out over the edge dangled an eel. Not in the water but in the air, with its head almost level with the spiller and the tip of its tail an inch or two above the surface of the stream.

  I’d heard about eels catching their prey and then spinning their bodies around their own axes in a violent spiral. This eel had apparently spun so violently it had wrapped itself in the line and then kept going until it was lifted out of the water and left dangling in midair.

  It hung there quietly, its head lolloping to one side. I picked it up. Several yards of thick nylon line was wrapped tightly around the eel; it had bitten into its skin, leaving bloody stripes along its entire body, as though it had been lashed. I gently untangled the line and held the eel in my hand; it felt limp and heavy and dead. Then I put it into the bucket and watched it float belly up for ten seconds, twenty seconds, before it slowly turned over and started swimming along the inside.

  THERE ARE CIRCUMSTANCES THAT FORCE YOU TO CHOOSE WHAT TO believe, and for as long as I can remember, I’ve been the kind of person who chooses to believe what people consider verifiable, science over religion, the rational over the transcendental. But the eel makes that difficult. For anyone who has seen an eel die and then come back to life, rationality isn’t enough. Almost everything can
be explained; we can discuss different processes of oxygenation and metabolism or the eel’s protective secretion or its highly adapted gills. But on the other hand, I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I’m a witness. An eel can die and live once again.

  “They’re odd, eels,” Dad would say. And he always seemed mildly delighted when he said it. As though he needed the mystery. As though it filled some kind of emptiness in him. And I let it sway me, too. I decided that you find what you want to believe in when you need it. We needed the eel. The two of us wouldn’t have been the same without it.

  It was only much later, when I read the Bible, that I realized that this is exactly how faith arises. Having faith is to approach the mystery, that which lies beyond language and perception. Faith requires you to give up part of your logic and rationality. Paul wrote as much in his first letter to the Corinthians: “Your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.” Put differently, a believer must let go of intellectual thought, must let himself be convinced, not by rational argument or natural science or the truth that reveals itself under the microscope, but by feeling alone. “If any one among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise,” Paul wrote. Anyone who seeks faith must dare to become a fool.

  Only a fool can believe in miracles. There’s something both terrifying and tempting about it. When Jesus walks on water, his apostles, who are sitting in a boat, are frightened at first. They think he’s a ghost. But Jesus tells them: “Take heart, it is I; have no fear,” and Peter dares to step out onto the water to meet him. That first step, when Peter lifts his foot over the boat’s railing and puts it down on the water’s surface, is the beginning of everything. The familiar meets the unfamiliar. Something he thought he understood turns out to be something else entirely. And he chooses to believe it. When Jesus reaches the boat, the apostles all fall to their knees and say: “Truly, you are the son of God.”