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

the eel industry has also supported a distinct and in places significant economy. Over the past few decades, exports to Japan—which is now responsible for 70 percent of the world’s eel consumption and which, like Europe and America, is feeling the effects of a shrinking eel population—have risen dramatically.

Particularly devastating to the eel’s complex life cycle has been the fishing for glass eels. These days, this is primarily done in Spain and France—in the Basque Country, glass eels fried in oil and garlic have become an increasingly expensive delicacy in recent decades—and since they are caught in such large numbers, and at such an early stage of life, the fishing has an outsize impact on the greater population.

A threat that’s more difficult to illustrate, but which may nevertheless be the most serious, is climate change. It’s an indisputable fact that when the climate changes, both the direction and the strength of the great ocean currents change, which seems to be impeding the eel’s migration significantly. Altered currents can make it more difficult for the silver eels to get across the Atlantic and find the right spawning ground. More important, however, is the effect this has on the newly hatched larvae that helplessly drift along the currents to Europe.

When the currents weaken and change course, it likely also affects the location of the spawning grounds within the Sargasso Sea, which means the weightless, transparent larvae may fail to find the current that is supposed to carry them to Europe, or that they are simply carried in the wrong direction. Moreover, climate change can alter the currents’ temperature and salinity, which in turn affects the production of plankton on which the larvae feed during their journey.

Several studies point to climate change as a major contributing factor in depressing the number of glass eels reaching the coasts in recent years. It is, if nothing else, an ominous warning signal. It means, after all, that the extremely complicated and sensitive process that is the eel’s migration and reproduction, which has functioned for millions of years, has now, in just a few short decades, been fundamentally hobbled.

SO WHAT WILL REMAIN OF THE EEL IF IT GOES EXTINCT? PICTURES, memories, and stories, of course. A riddle that was never fully solved.

Perhaps the eel will become the new dodo. Perhaps it will seem less and less like a real, living creature and more and more like a tragicomic, symbolic reminder of what humankind is capable of in its most oblivious moments.

The dodo was a clumsy, broad-beaked bird that humans first came across at the end of the sixteenth century and had hunted to extinction less than one hundred years later. It was discovered and described for the first time by Dutch sailors on the island in the Indian Ocean that would later be named Mauritius, the only place in the world it ever lived, as far as we know.

It was a large bird, about three feet tall and weighing more than thirty pounds. It had tiny wings, grayish-brown feathers, a bald head with a slightly bent, green-and-black beak. Its legs were yellow and powerful, its rump rounded and wide. It was flightless and moved fairly slowly, but had no natural enemies on the island before humans arrived. Contemporary depictions often ridiculed its appearance, almost caricaturing it; its expressionless eyes like tiny round buttons in its big, bald head, a look of surprise and dim-wittedness on its face.

The earliest mention of the dodo in writing, in a report from a Dutch expedition in 1598, describes it as a bird twice the size of a swan but with the wings of a pigeon. It was also said that it didn’t taste particularly good and that its meat was tough no matter how long you cooked it, but that the belly and breast were at least edible.

Which is of course what the Dutch sailors did to the dodo: they ate it. It was very easy to catch, after all. It’s said the birds didn’t even try to escape when the sailors approached them. They were fat and rich in meat; three or four of them was enough to feed a whole crew. Dodoes were described as nonchalant and unperturbed, as though utterly unable to imagine that another creature could potentially constitute a threat. A drawing from 1648 shows sailors merrily beating the clumsy birds to death with big sticks. Their fate was not only to be the dinner of hungry Dutch sailors, however; humans also brought other invasive species to the island: dogs, pigs, and rats that competed for space and food and raided the dodoes’ nests, eating their eggs and chicks.

In the summer of 1681, Benjamin Harry, a sailor, mentioned in his diary that he had seen a dodo in Mauritius. That represents the last documented sighting of a living specimen. The dodo he saw was, if the story is to be believed, the very last one. Then it was dead, extinct, and all that remained were fading memories.

For a while, the dodo was forgotten or depicted as a vaguely mythological creature, rather than a real animal. Some doubted it had ever existed at all. When Alexander Melville and Hugh Strickland published their book The Dodo and Its Kindred, the most exhaustive description of the dodo at the time, in 1848, they were forced to admit that information about this bird, which had been extinct for more than 160 years, was scarce, to say the least. “We possess only the rude descriptions of unscientific voyagers, three or four oil paintings, and a few scattered osseous fragments, which have survived the neglect of two hundred years. The paleontologist has, in many cases, far better data for determining the zoological characters of a species perished myriads of years ago, than those presented by a group of birds, several species of which were living in the realm of Charles the First.”

They were at least able to establish that the closest living relative of the dodo is the pigeon; modern DNA testing has