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

look like reproductive organs and eggs, but how could anyone know for sure? In order to consider something proved, systematic observation and further study were required; instead of enlightenment, the eel prompted a moderate flare-up in academic debate. A renowned anatomy professor, Antonio Maria Valsalva, was of the opinion that what Vallisneri wanted to call reproductive organs and eggs were in all likeliness common, unsensational fatty tissue. Someone else claimed it was probably a collapsed swim bladder. The doubts provoked squabbling within the scientific community. A professor by the name of Pietro Molinelli offered a reward to anyone who could produce an eel with verifiable eggs inside. He did receive one promising specimen, until it was discovered that the fisherman who had provided the eel in the hopes of pocketing the reward had crammed it full of roe from a completely different species of fish.

And so the Comacchio eel became something of an academic legend—but the eel question remained unanswered. What had in fact been found was never fully agreed on. And in Sweden, Carl Linnaeus, who in 1758 gave the European eel its scientific name, came to the perhaps more convenient conclusion that the eel probably gives birth to live young.

It would take seventy more years after Vallisneri’s insight before there was another breakthrough in the eel question. In an almost uncanny instance of repetition, another eel, also caught near Comacchio, ended up on a table at the University of Bologna. This time, the table belonged to Carlo Mondini, a professor of anatomy who would later become famous for his description and naming of a deformity in the human ear that causes deafness. Mondini examined the eel and wrote a now classic treatise, in which the reproductive organs and eggs of a sexually mature female eel were for the first time described with a measure of scientific accuracy. The original Comacchio eel, the one Antonio Vallisneri had sent to Bologna seventy years prior, had, according to Mondini, been misunderstood. By comparing his own findings with those of his predecessors, he was able to establish that what had been found in that eel could with some degree of certainty be said to be a collapsed swim bladder. But this new eel was the real thing. The folds inside it really were its reproductive organs, and the tiny droplet-shaped objects inside really were eggs.

It was 1777, and the question of what the eel is could finally be said to have been provisionally answered. If eels could possess reproductive organs, and be shown to produce eggs, at least that demonstrated they weren’t the products of spontaneous generation. The eel still remained a mystery in many respects, but at least a mystery with a degree of anchoring in the observable, describable world. Mondini’s discovery brought eels and humans a little bit closer. Now all that was missing was the second half of the equation.

4Looking into the Eyes of an Eel

My father liked eel fishing for several reasons. I don’t know which was the most important.

What I do know is that he liked it down by the stream. He liked the magical, overgrown environment, the quietly rushing water, the willow tree, and the bats. It was only a few hundred yards from his childhood home, a farm with a main house and stables from which a narrow gravel path led down the gentle slope toward the stream. My father had run up and down that path as a child, to go fishing or swimming. The stream had constituted the metaphorical outer limit of his world. He had crept through the tall grass by the water’s edge, catching live mice, which he’d put in his pocket and bring home to use for slingshot target practice in the yard. He had skated on the frozen overflows in the winter. In the summer, he had been able to hear the sound of the rapids when he was kneeling in the fields, thinning beets or picking potatoes.

The stream represented his roots, everything familiar he always returned to. But the eels moving through its depths, occasionally revealing themselves to us, represented something else entirely. They were, if anything, a reminder of how little a person can really know, about eels or other people, about where you come from and where you’re going.

I also know Dad liked eating eel. In the summer, when there had been a lot of fishing, he would happily have eel several times a week. He would usually eat it with potatoes and melted butter. Mum did the cooking, taking the skinned, cleaned eel we provided and cutting it up into four-inch pieces that she breaded and fried in butter with a pinch of salt and pepper. I liked to watch. Every time she placed the fish in the hot pan, something incredible happened. The bits of eel moved. They twitched spasmodically in the searing heat. As though there were still life left in them.

I would stand next to my mother and watch in wonder. A body that had just been alive but was now dead, cut into pieces even. And yet, it moved! If death meant motionlessness, could it really be said that the eel was dead? If death robs us of the ability to feel, how come the eel could still feel the heat in the pan? There was no heart beating, but there was some kind of life in it. I wondered where to draw the line between life and death.

Later on, I read that octopuses have myriad nerve endings in their limbs. There are in fact more nerve cells in an octopus’s limbs than in its brain, and each prehensile arm is also a nerve center, independent of the central brain in the animal’s head. It’s as though octopuses have small but autonomous brains at the end of each arm—which is to say that each one can act of its own volition. An octopus can, for example, both taste and feel with its arms, and some species even have photosensitive