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

it was hoped the number of rings on its otolith, a kind of calcareous organ of the inner ear, would establish its age once and for all. Unfortunately, no otolith was ever found; perhaps the tiny crystalline structure had disappeared when the body decomposed. The sediment at the bottom of the well was dug up and sifted through, but the otolith wasn’t there either. Somehow, the eel managed to cheat humanity one last time, even if it had grown too weary to cheat death.

REGARDLESS OF WHICH ASPECTS OF THE LEGEND OF THE BRANTEVIK Eel are true, it’s a fact that eels can live for a very long time. The oldest eel whose age has more or less been verified was caught in Helsingborg in 1863 by a twelve-year-old boy named Fritz Netzler. The eel was a couple of years old at the time, thin, and no more than fifteen inches long. It had arrived from its long journey from the Sargasso Sea, transformed from glass eel to yellow eel, and had wandered into Öresund and up a waterway called Hälsobäcken, which at the time ran straight through a park in central Helsingborg. There, before the eel had made it more than a few hundred yards up the waterway, Fritz Netzler caught it. He named the eel Putte and kept it in a small tank in the apartment in Helsingborg where he lived. The eel grew older, but not much bigger. The years passed and the eel remained in a juvenile state, thin and just over fifteen inches long.

Putte was about twenty when Fritz Netzler’s father, whose name was also Fritz and who was a doctor, died, and for a while the eel and its captor were separated. Putte and his tank moved from family to family in Helsingborg. He might also have lived in Lund for a while.

He was nearly forty when in 1899, he moved back in with Fritz Netzler Jr., who by then was a man and a doctor just like his father. Putte was still thin and just over fifteen inches long, and after so many years in tiny tanks in dark flats, his eyes had grown disproportionately large, just like the Brantevik Eel’s. It’s said Putte would eat out of Fritz’s hand. Meat or fish; his favorite was calf liver cut into small pieces.

Eventually, the eel outlived its captor. Putte was nearing his seventieth birthday when Fritz Netzler Jr. died in 1929, and after a few years with yet another family, he was finally donated to the Helsingborg Museum in 1939. That’s where Putte eventually passed away, at ostensibly eighty-eighty years old, in 1948.

Putte was stuffed and is today kept in storage at the museum. According to its catalog, the item consists of “Putte the eel in tank with lid, containing eel in fluid and rocks.” The tank is twenty inches long. Putte himself, in taxidermized form, is just under fifteen.

And so Putte the eel likely lived for almost ninety years and was still, in human terms, more or less a teenager. Because, like the Brantevik Eel, Putte wasn’t just an eel that remained remarkably small; he never underwent the last metamorphosis that would have turned him into a sexually mature silver eel. Which points to another mysterious aspect of the eel question: How does the eel know to initiate its various transformations? How does the eel know when life is coming to an end and the Sargasso Sea is beckoning? What kind of voice lets it know it’s time to leave?

It can’t just be random. Because apparently the eel is capable of suspending its own aging, no matter how long it lives for. When circumstances require it, its final metamorphosis is postponed indefinitely. If the eel isn’t free to go to the Sargasso Sea, it won’t undergo the final metamorphosis, won’t turn into a silver eel, and won’t become sexually mature. Instead, it waits, patiently, for decades, until the opportunity presents itself or it runs out of strength. When life doesn’t turn out the way it was supposed to, an eel can put everything on hold, and postpone dying almost indefinitely.

When a scientific study in Ireland in the 1980s caught a large number of sexually mature silver eels, it was discovered that the age of the fish—which were on their way to the Sargasso Sea and thus in the final stage of life—varied significantly. The youngest was only eight and the oldest fifty-seven. They were all in the same developmental phase, the same relative age, if you will, and yet the oldest was seven times older than the youngest.

You have to ask yourself: How does a creature like that perceive time?

To humans, the experience of time is inevitably tied to the process of aging, and aging follows a fairly predictable chronological trajectory. Humans don’t undergo metamorphoses in the technical sense; we change but remain the same. Overall health can, of course, vary among individuals; we can suffer illness or injury, but generally speaking, we know roughly when to expect a new phase; our biological clock is not particularly flexible; we know when we are younger and when we grow older.

The eel, by contrast, becomes something else each time it transforms, and each stage of its life cycle can be drawn out or condensed depending on where it is and what the circumstances are. Its aging seems tied to something other than time.

Does a creature like the eel even experience time as a process, or more like a state? Does it, simply put, have a different way of measuring time? Oceanic time, perhaps?

Rachel Carson claimed that in the sea, deep down where the eel spawns and dies, time moves differently from how it does for us. Down there, time has somehow outlived its usefulness and is irrelevant to the experience of reality. Down there, our regular chronological measurements don’t exist. There is neither night nor day, winter nor summer; everything unfolds at its own pace. Rachel Carson wrote her book Under the Sea-Wind about the abyss