The Book of Eels by Tom Fort, HarperCollins, 拢16.99, ISBN 000711592X Reviewed by John Bonner
SLIPPERY customer, the eel. For two millennia some of the best scientific brains in Europe, and some lesser lights, have tried to coax this enigmatic fish to reveal its secrets. They wanted to know how a creature with no visible sexual organs managed to reproduce, where it came from and where it went.
Like many Ancient Greeks, Aristotle was partial to eel, even though he believed that they came from unappetising beginnings as the offspring of mud-dwelling worms. The 19th-century Scottish factory manager David Cairncross was even wider of the mark when he published a book in 1862 arguing that eels start their lives as tiny filaments growing from the backsides of beetles.
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As a physiology postgrad, Sigmund Freud spent months dissecting more than 400 eel carcasses trying to locate the genitals. Then he gave up in disgust and went off to try something else. 鈥淎fter the riddle of the eel鈥檚 gonads, the exploration of the human psyche and the identification of the castration complex must have seemed comparatively straightforward,鈥� observes Fort in his fascinating, beautifully written and deeply peculiar book.
He explains how the great chemist and enthusiastic angler Sir Humphrey Davy came closest to the truth when he surmised that eels migrate to the ocean depths to breed. By 1896, Italian biologist Giovanni Battista Grassi had found the first evidence for this after netting adult eels with developing sex organs off the coast of Sicily. He then guessed, correctly, that some small fish found in large numbers in the same area were larval eels.
Yet Grassi was only half right. Danish oceanographer Johannes Schmidt thought the Atlantic was a more likely breeding ground than the Mediterranean. Wisely choosing the heiress to the Carlsberg brewing fortune as his wife, he was able to finance a series of expeditions, netting eel larvae along the way. The smallest were found in the Sargasso Sea, between the West Indies and the Azores in 1922. For 80 years, Schmidt鈥檚 views have been the textbook explanation of the eel鈥檚 life cycle. But no one has ever found adult eels in the vicinity or picked up fertilised eel ova from the ocean depths.
Fort鈥檚 The Eelsis more than a scientific detective story, it is a rich concoction of different genres, part social history and part autobiography, seasoned with culinary tips (eel recipes through the ages).
But this book is also a lament for a vanishing way of life. The commercial eel fisheries in Europe and North America, and the livelihoods they provide, are disappearing. For a host of possible reasons 鈥� pollution, habitat destruction, disease or changes in the deep ocean currents 鈥� catches are falling. The eel itself will probably survive but ancient knowledge of how to outwit this secretive creature is all but lost.