The Book of Eels, Patrik Svensson [bill gates best books .TXT] 📗

born that he’d picked up somewhere. His own stories about caught or lost eels I knew already, because I’d been there with him. His stories were my stories. It was as though there had been nothing before us.

Was that the case? Did it start with the two of us? If so, did it have anything to do with the fact that the person he called Father and I Grandfather was really someone else? Were our nights by the stream an attempt to compensate for something my dad hadn’t had, to realize his own vision of what a father and son could be to each other? A way of forging his own narrow path through life?

7The Dane Who Found the Eel’s Breeding Ground

How far do you have to be prepared to go to understand an eel? Or a person? Johannes Schmidt was twenty-seven years old when he stepped aboard the steamship Thor in 1904 and set off to find the birthplace of the eel. It would be almost twenty years before he reached his destination. A few years after he did, a British marine biologist, Walter Garstang, would write an ode to Schmidt, which was eventually published in what might very well be the only collection of poems ever written about the larval stage of various animals, Larval Forms, with Other Zoological Verses.

All honour to the Danes who solved

This age-old mystery,

Who, step by step, and year by year,

Revealed the history:

Johannes Schmidt the leader,

With “Papa” Petersen behind,

Who made the “Thor” and “Dana” ships of fame

For all mankind

Quite a lot had happened in humankind’s dogged quest to understand the eel’s life and existence since Sigmund Freud’s fruitless search for testes in Trieste. A Danish marine biologist, C. G. Petersen, had in the 1890s managed to observe the last metamorphosis of the eel and proposed that all eels reproduce in the sea. Even Aristotle had, as we know, noticed that fully grown eels sometimes move out into the sea, and in the seventeenth century, Francesco Redi had noted that glass eels appear along the coasts in the spring and wander up rivers. But Petersen was able to describe how it happens in more detail. In particular, he successfully observed and described how yellow eels turn into silver eels. Until then, a lot of people were unconvinced that the two belonged to the same species. Petersen demonstrated unambiguously that they were each manifestations of the same fish. He saw the silver eel’s digestive organs shrink and saw it stop eating, saw its reproductive organs develop and its fins and eyes change. The transformation was apparently the eel’s way of preparing for procreation.

In 1896, two Italian researchers, Giovanni Battista Grassi and his student Salvatore Calandruccio, had also explained the first metamorphosis of the eel. They had made a comparative anatomical study of different kinds of larvae caught in the Mediterranean to glass eels, and drew from it the conclusion that a small creature shaped like a willow leaf called Leptocephalus brevirostris must be the very first form of the European eel, Anguilla anguilla. This larva had previously been believed to be its own species. Now it became clear it was in fact an eel. What’s more, Grassi and Calandruccio were also the first people ever to witness the metamorphosis, when a small willow leaf in their aquarium in Messina on Sicily miraculously turned itself into a glass eel.

It was a sensational discovery. “When I reflect that this mystery has occupied the attention of naturalists since the days of Aristotle, it seems to me that a short extract of my work is perhaps not unworthy to be presented to the Royal Society of London,” Grassi wrote in a report that would eventually be published in what was at the time one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. In his report, Grassi also noted that this particular kind of larva, which had now been shown to be the first incarnation of the eel, had relatively large eyes and consequently was probably hatched at great depths. Possibly, he proposed, in the Mediterranean.

By the early twentieth century, it was known, then, that the yellow eel turns into the sexually mature silver eel and wanders back into the sea in the autumn, never to return. It was also known that leptocephalus larvae turn into tiny, delicious glass eels that appear around the coasts of Europe in spring in search of a place where they can live and transform themselves into fully grown yellow eels. But what happens in between? And where does it happen?

When the German zoologist Carl H. Eigenmann gave a speech to the American Microscopical Society in Denver, Colorado, in 1901, he entitled his lecture “The Solution of the Eel Question.” It was not intended literally. He was still unable to provide the ultimate solution to the eel question. On the contrary, he cited a scientific anecdote according to which “all important questions have now been answered, save the eel question.” But, Eigenmann explained, the question itself had changed. Before, the eel question had been about what the eel truly was, a fish or something else altogether. It had been about the eel’s propagation—about finding its reproductive organs, about whether the eel gave birth to live young, whether it was hermaphroditic or not—and about what its metamorphoses signified.

But now, at the dawn of the new century, the eel question was this: What do mature eels do after moving back into the sea? When and where do they breed? And where do they die?

SO WHERE DID THE SILVER EELS GO? AND WHERE DID ALL THE MYSTERIOUS willow leaves come from? Where was the eel’s birthplace? That was what the twenty-seven-year-old Johannes Schmidt set out to find in the spring of 1904.

Johannes Schmidt was a marine biologist from Denmark. He lived his first few years in a small redbrick house on the grounds of Jægerspris Castle on North Zealand, about thirty miles north of Copenhagen, where his father was the steward.