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

Signs of a wonderful intelligence . . . I could not observe, but indeed an uncommon love for one another, which even extended so far that, when one of them was hooked, all the others were intent upon saving him. Some tried to prevent the wounded comrade from [being drawn on] the beach by [forming] a closed circle [around him]; some attempted to upset the yawl; others laid themselves over the rope or tried to pull the harpoon out of [his] body.

One of the males, Steller wrote, even returned two days in a row to check on one of the females who lay dead on the beach. “Nevertheless, no matter how many of them were wounded or killed, they always remained in one place.”

The encounter with the languid but loving sea cows was not just a profound experience for Georg Wilhelm Steller; it was a biological sensation. Sirenians, mammals that are in fact more closely related to the elephant than the seal or the whale, are normally found only in tropical waters. This species lived on a cold, barren island far in the unexplored northern part of the Pacific Ocean, and apparently only there. Steller’s sea cow was yet another powerful example of the complexity of evolution and the mesmerizing diversity of this world. A strange living wonder in one of the world’s most inhospitable places.

But like sirens, Steller’s sea cow brought destruction on both its discoverers and itself. Vitus Bering died on the island on December 8 and was buried in the sand by the water’s edge. About half the crew shared his fate. Steller himself made it. He and the other survivors wintered on Bering Island, surviving by catching sea otters, whose flesh they ate raw. In the spring, they managed to build a new ship from the wreckage of the Saint Peter, and in August 1742, more than a year after they set off, they returned to Kamchatka, emaciated and decimated. Georg Wilhelm Steller published his observations, and was able to tell the world about the strange northern sirenians, but soon after lost himself to drink and died, just thirty-seven years old, in Tyumen’, Russia, in 1746.

And Steller’s sea cows perished, too. Russian hunters followed in Bering’s footsteps and found the languid animals to be easy prey. In 1768, only twenty-seven years after being discovered by Steller, the last sirenian was killed in the Bering Sea, and today few people even know it ever existed. It vanished from humankind’s awareness and realm of knowledge with a quiet sigh, docilely accepting its fate. Unlike the dodo, it didn’t even pass into the vernacular.

BUT THE EEL IS NEITHER A DODO NOR A SEA COW. FIRSTLY, IT’S NOT isolated on some island in the Indian Ocean or the Bering Sea. Secondly, it has survived humanity for too long to come to that kind of abrupt end. And surely all the energy spent on understanding it over the centuries can’t have been for naught?

Because there are, after all, a lot of people doing their best to help the eel. Just as the life cycle of the eel has for centuries aroused the curiosity of science, many scientists working today consider its demise the most important challenge they currently face.

Some of the alarms sounded by researchers and organizations like ICES and IUCN have been taken very seriously. At least in Europe. In 2007, the European Union adopted a management plan containing a series of radical proposals to try to save the eel. Every member country committed to implement measures to ensure that at least 40 percent of all silver eels can reach the sea, by, for example, limiting fishing and building alternative passes to circumvent dams and power stations. All exports to non-European countries, such as the insatiable Japanese market, have been banned (though illegal exports are still assumed to be substantial), and anyone fishing for glass eels must set aside at least 35 percent of the catch for reintroduction into the wild. In the same year, 2007, Sweden’s National Board of Fisheries banned any form of eel fishing in Sweden, with the exception of professional eel fishermen with special permits, or in fresh water upstream from the third migration barrier.

At first, the measures seemed to be having an effect. In the years that followed, the European eel did seem to recover slightly. There was, above all, an increase in the number of glass eels arriving from the Sargasso Sea, and for the first time in a long time, the people who care about eels could allow themselves a quantum of optimism.

But since 2012, the trend has reversed and the rate of recovery has leveled off. The slight uptick seems to have been a temporary exception, and the goals set up in the EU’s management plan have remained far from achieved. On the whole, the eel’s situation is at least as dire today as it was before 2007.

We seem to be stuck in a “utopian deadlock,” as Willem Dekker, an eel expert at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala, wrote in a summary of the situation in 2016. The hopefulness we had been feeling for some time turned out to rest on unrealistic expectations. The measures put in place to save the eel, Dekker claimed, are not only insufficient, they also risk becoming a placating form of misdirection. As long as we cling to what we think we know, what we believe to be right, the eel’s situation will never improve, but instead worsen.

And while the problem continues to be debated, time passes.

In the autumn of 2017, the EU’s agriculture and fisheries ministers were due to set new fishing quotas, and the European Commission’s surprisingly radical proposal was to ban all eel fishing in the Baltic Sea. Sweden supported a blanket ban at first, but when no other country joined the cause, it chose to abandon it. It’s important to be open to negotiation, the Swedish minister for rural affairs, Sven-Erik Bucht, stressed; he, like so many others, apparently had fonder feelings