Eels Read online

  Not one month later Chen died of a heart attack.

  As I recorded the details of the story in my notebook I came to the chilling realization that the tales I had heard in New Zealand—about things that happened to people when they took too much from the resource—were very similar to Jonathan’s contemporary one. If a Maori were to interpret this story, he or she would most certainly conclude that Chen had ignored the warnings of a guardian eel. The monster eel that cried like a baby was a taniwha.

  Jonathan asked me why I was studying eels. I told him that my initial interest had come from a fascination for the life history of the eel—the only fish that journeys from freshwater to the middle of an ocean to spawn—and had evolved into an exploration of the eels’ importance in world cultures. Jonathan said that he felt we were alike: we both liked travel and to meet interesting people.

  Several times during our conversation, Jonathan got a call on his cell phone and began speaking Chinese. The calls reminded me that I had come to Maine to learn about the glass eel trade, yet I could not get away from my fascination for the other reality of eels, what manifested as folklore.

  “This is busy time,” Jonathan said to me, “peak season for glass eels. We about to make big shipment to China. Over one thousand kilos.” I did a quick calculation—five million eels.

  Earlier in the year, Jonathan had been buying glass eels, Anguilla rostrata, from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba, when they first entered freshwater there in November. Then he was in Asia in January, buying Japanese glass eels, Anguilla japonica, from fishermen in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan.

  I imagined a possible scenario for one of the glass eels in Jonathan’s next shipment; the extended migration it could unwittingly be a part of. An eel, born in the Atlantic Ocean, netted in the mouth of a river in coastal Maine, is flown from Boston to Hong Kong, raised in a farm of nearby Fujian Province, cleaned, grilled, and packaged in factories on site, and finally flown to a New York airport, ending up on a plate in a sushi restaurant in Manhattan (80 percent of the eel consumed in the United States is pre-prepared in factories in China). That same eel, of course, could end up alive or dead in a restaurant just about anywhere in the world.

  Jonathan told me that the majority of eels that Japanese eat are of American or European origin raised in farms in China. They prefer to eat their native eel, Anguilla japonica, but because it is rare, it is also much more expensive.

  In 1997, Jonathan went to North Korea to buy Anguilla japonica glass eels. He couldn’t wire money to a bank in North Korea because, he said, the government changes it to local currency and then it’s worthless. So he brought a rolling carry-on bag filled with $1.2 million in U.S. hundred-dollar bills. With that money he bought 160 pounds of glass eels, which comes out to about $7,500 per pound. “At that time,” Jonathan said, “more than price for gold.”

  Even in an average year, glass eels are the most expensive food fish in the world.

  “This is very big business, very risky,” Jonathan said.

  The market price for glass eels is based on the market price for adults. But if the price for adult eels falls during the fourteen to eighteen months it takes to raise a glass eel for market, Jonathan’s Chinese buyer can go bankrupt.

  “One year, the farm sells high, they all drive MercedesBenzes,” Jonathan said. “Next year, price falls, they’re riding bicycles.”

  Jonathan said he didn’t spend the majority of the year anywhere in particular. He was on the road all the time, here and there in rented apartments or small homes—he didn’t have a permanent address. “I don’t like to own things,” he said.

  Before he went into eels, Yang traded sandalwood in Tonga, New Caledonia, and Fiji. When the sandalwood was gone he bought two ships and fished giant clams. “In Japan they eat giant clam muscle,” he said, “good for sashimi.” After losing money with clams he went into the lucrative business of selling shark fins in China for soup. But when he saw dolphins caught accidentally on long-line hooks being dragged aboard ship, beaten to death, and thrown back into the sea, he quit. “When they take the dolphins on the ship,” Yang said, “you know, they are weeping—you can see the tears.”

  He said he did his job because he liked nature, which to me seemed counterintuitive. A man who loves nature shows his affection by exploiting it? He explained that the Chinese believe that the resource can never be used up—“they eat anything,” he joked—but he personally knew that it could.

  In the meantime, Pat had returned from Portland and the meeting with her urchin dealer. Jonathan had to go visit another eel supplier, Bill Sheldon, in the town of Bath. I gave him a ride because his car was on the fritz. It was a beautiful May day.

  * At this time of year in New Zealand and other parts of the Southern Hemisphere, their autumn, adult eels are beginning to migrate to the sea to spawn.

  ** How long it takes for an eel larva to get to the coast of North America from the time it hatches is still speculative-no one has been able to follow a juvenile eel on its ocean journey to know for certain. It is thought that it takes a larva two to three years to reach the coast of Europe from the Sargasso.

  * The word elver is thought to have come from a phenomenon in mid-May on the Thames that eel fishermen used to term the “eel fair.” At this time of year many accounts describe (and this was not unique to the Thames) a run of young eels, each about two inches in length, that formed a dense column five inches wide that ran uninterrupted for many miles. The following account is given in The Natural History of the Fishes of Massachusetts by Jerome V. C. Smith, 1833: “As the procession generally lasts two or three days, and as they appear to move at the rate of nearly two miles and a half an hour, some idea may be formed of their enormous number.” Smith continues with a telling account of how the eels divide their numbers as they move past tributaries of the main river: “When the column arrives at the entrance of a tributary stream … a certain portion of the column will continue to progress up the tributary stream, and the main phalanx will either cross the river to the opposite bank, or will, after a stiff struggle to oppose the force of the tributary branch in its emptying process, cross the mouth of this estuary, and regain its original line of march on the same side of the river.” Unfortunately, such epic migrations no longer occur on the Thames.

  ** The distinctiveness of the eel’s appearance in its various life stages led to the creation of numerous species names for the same fish. In Europe alone there were over thirty species names given for what is now considered a single species of eel, Anguilla anguilla.

  * According to Tesch’s work on eels, total world eel harvest from fishing and aquaculture in 1995 amounted to over 205,000 metric tons, with an estimated market value of $3.1 billion. Eels represented 12 percent of the total value of world aquaculture production that year. A single eel farm in Canton, China, was capable of raising, cleaning, grilling kabayaki-style, freezing, and packaging eight thousand tons of eels annually, most of which was shipped to Japan. Farms in China require infusions of hundreds of millions of glass eels annually to keep up with demand.

  * Curiously, several of the places where eels are still important culturally, such as the Basque region and Northern Ireland, also support local nationalist resistance groups (ETA and IRA, respectively). You could include the Maori in New Zealand as a nonviolent example.

  ** On March 22, 1621, the Pilgrims made peace with Massasoit of the Wampanoag Indians. The next day Squanto went fishing for eels to feed the Pilgrims, who were starving. The following account is from Mourt’s Relation, written contemporaneously: “Friday [the 23rd of March] was a very fair day. Samoset and Squanto still remained with us. Squanto went at noon to fish for eels. At night he came home with as many as he could well lift in one hand; which our people were glad of. They were fat and sweet. He trod them out with his feet; and so caught them with his hands without any other instrument.”

  * The number of glass eels in a pound can vary greatly. Canadian glass eels a
re small, with about 2,700 fish in a pound. North Carolina eels are about the same; in South Carolina they’re bigger, averaging 2,200 per pound. In Maine they average 2,500 per pound.

  ** Technically, grilled eel without rice is called kabayaki unagi, and the dish with rice is called unagi donburi, or unajyu.

  * The large native eel of Taiwan would be the tropical freshwater species, Anguilla marmorata, which resembles the New Zealand longfin, Anguilla dieffenbachii, but its skin is mottled with marble-like markings.

  ** One of the greatest stories of the aphrodisiac qualities of eating eel can be found in Brillat-Savarin’s The Philosopher in the Kitchen. The story, called “The Dish of Eel,” tells of a woman known throughout Paris as the “Ace of Spades” who serves a dish of eel to a group of parish priests from the local diocese. After the priests devour the delicious meal, “the reverend men were stirred in an unaccustomed manner, and as a result of the inevitable influence of matter on mind, their conversation took a ribald turn.” They told of college escapades and scandalous rumors, but later were “ashamed of the things they had said.” They attributed everything to the dish of eel.

  * Anguilla marmorata, the lo moa species found in rivers of southern Taiwan, is also native to freshwater streams of the islands of Micronesia and east through Indonesia.

  chapter six

  INTO THE

  Ocean

  The Sargasso Sea

  James McCleave has made more expeditions to the Sargasso Sea to look for spawning eels than anyone else alive. Friedrich Tesch, the German eel biologist, and author of Der Aal, now deceased, took McCleave on his first oceanographic cruise in 1974 in the Bay of Biscay. Jim’s first Sargasso trip was in 1981, followed by two in 1983, two in 1984, one in 1985, and one in 1989. I met with him at the Inland Fisheries Office in Bangor, not far from where he taught fisheries oceanography at the University of Maine.

  McCleave is soft-spoken and modest about his eel work. He is one of the world’s top eel scientists, along with Katsumi Tsukamoto of Japan, Don Jellyman of New Zealand, Håkan Wickström of Sweden, Willem Dekker of Holland, and John Casselman of Canada. McCleave and I sat in a classroom around a large table.

  “I was looking through a list of my publications over the last thirty years,” McCleave laughed, his sea-blue eyes squinting behind his glasses, “and most of them are on eels.”

  McCleave theorizes that migrating adult eels identify the spawning grounds not by a geographical feature on the bottom, such as a seamount, but by something more subtle—frontal regions, where two different water masses come together at an area of temperature shift. Out in the middle of the Sargasso, water from the north is being driven south and water from the south is being driven north by trade winds, creating many such fronts, sometimes made visible on the surface by big lines of sargassum weed. It is in these areas where Jim and his colleagues have caught the smallest larvae, those most recently hatched, and therefore closest to the adults.

  They cruised back and forth across these frontal regions with acoustic gear, hoping to find echoes that would have been of the right strength to come from an aggregation of spawning eels (sonar detects fish underwater by echoing off the air in their swim bladders).

  “We occasionally found echoes that we thought might have been groups of eels,” Jim said, “but by the time we got the ship turned around and dropped the nets, we were off the mark and never caught anything.”

  I had a lot of questions for Jim. Where in the water column did the eels reproduce? Were large pelagic fishes out there trying to eat all these eels meeting to lay their eggs? Why did eels go so far to spawn?

  Jim smiled politely.

  “Dunno,” he laughed, and then gave me his scientific best.

  “Eels have been around for about two hundred million years,” he began, “have survived all kinds of climatic changes, including many ice ages, and have been influenced in geographic distribution and speciation by continental drift. The spawning areas have certainly moved and changed over the millennia, so it’s possible that at one time the eels’ spawning area may have been closer to the coast.”* He reasoned that the American and European eels continued to spawn out in that place, the Sargasso, because it was the only place—with the right temperature and salinity—where the larvae can be reared. “Not all species of Anguilla make such long migrations,” Jim said, “but all the species that we know anything about spawn in warm, salty water out over deep water.”

  I asked Jim a series of further questions about eels. After each of them he folded his hands in thought. He twisted his head and then said in his self-effacing way, “We don’t know.” Then he would amplify: “We thought that …” or “We tried to …” After years of studying this fascinating fish, not only in the ocean but in their freshwater habitats, Jim acknowledged that in the end maybe it was not so important to know where they went to spawn.

  “Part of it,” he said, “is everyone wanting to solve the mystery. There’s a fellow named Willem Dekker in the Netherlands. He’s the chairman of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea working group on eels. He’s done all kinds of population dynamics studies on eels and so on. He’s never worked in the ocean, but to him the most burning question is to find the spawning adult European eel in the Sargasso Sea. And I keep saying, ‘Willem, you know, what difference does it make if you actually catch one, ‘cause we know the little larvae are there? ‘ ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘because we haven’t completed the life cycle.’ ”

  But, Jim added, “if we knew where the spawning area was, then maybe we could find out why eel populations are in such severe decline. The declines might be due to some feature in the ocean that is affecting larval transport or larval survival, as opposed to things affecting eel populations on land, like dams and overfishing. But without knowing what’s going on in the ocean, it’s hard to say.”

  Later that afternoon I drove to the Department of Marine Resources to interview Jim’s colleague Gail Wippelhauser, who had accompanied Jim on several expeditions to the Sargasso. The expeditions usually left in early February from Miami and involved weeks of towing fine-mesh nets for larvae. She described the Sargasso as a place of “huge thermal gradients and mesocurrents.”

  Gail spoke of the history of Sargasso expeditions, starting with Johannes Schmidt. After decades of larvae collection, Schmidt concluded in his papers that both American and European eels spawn in a single place, the Sargasso Sea. But, as McCleave points out in his contribution to the book Eel Biology, Schmidt’s case rested on “a modest amount of published data.” The reason the Sargasso proposition has stuck so well is not because it is irrefutable but because Schmidt “presented the case so forcefully that his ideas were largely accepted and still are.”*

  McCleave and others strongly assert that Schmidt’s data were not sufficient to support his grand concluding statement in 1935: “In the Sargasso Sea, the newly hatched larvae of our eels were found, and with the aid of numerous sections of fishing experiments we had been able to determine their distribution and settle conclusively that they are found in an area to the north-east of St. Thomas and south-east of the Bermudas and nowhere else.”

  The problem with the phrase “and nowhere else” was that Schmidt had barely taken any samples for eel larvae outside of his purported spawning area (in particular south of 20 degrees north latitude). How could he say for sure that the freshwater eel was not spawning elsewhere when he hadn’t really looked?

  Earlier in his life, in 1922, a more modest Schmidt, younger and presumably less focused on securing his legacy, wrote: “I perceived that if the problem were to be solved in anything like a satisfactory manner it would be necessary to ascertain, not only where the youngest larvae were to be found, but also where they were not. Until a comprehensive survey had been obtained as to the distribution and respective density of the various sizes of larvae in all parts of the sea, it would hardly be possible to form definite conclusions as to the origins of the eels of our European continent.”<
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  After Schmidt, the Sargasso Sea was free of eel researchers until 1979, when Friedrich Tesch made his first trip there. This was followed by the various surveys of McCleave from 1981 to 1989, but all these were conducted in the known spawning area, where the anguillid larvae were abundant. And still today, most scientists who are enmeshed in the mystery will tell you that a comprehensive survey of the ocean for eel larvae in other regions outside the known spawning area has not yet been made. The only true answer to the question of whether there is one single or several separate or overlapping spawning areas for American and European eels in the Atlantic is “Dunno.”

  Gail said that she and Jim used to get together over a few beers and come up with harebrained ideas about how to find spawning eels. “We thought of attaching balloons to migrating eels that would inflate after a certain amount of time and the eel would pop to the surface.”

  Gail described one method they employed in their search for adult eels. “We brought artificially matured female eels and injected them with hormones to make them reproductively ripe. They put these big females out there in cages as decoys on buoys hoping they’d attract males. We lost sight of them. Things disappear very quickly in the ocean.” Gail couldn’t hold back. “I was so mad because I injected all those eels. Jim and I made trips to the Darling marine lab, alternating three times a week, a two-and-a-half-to-three-hour drive, to inject hormones to induce sexual maturation. We had a hundred artificially matured females to take out to the Sargasso Sea and lower in cages attached to buoys to attract males. By the time we got to Miami to catch the ship, most of them had died. And by the time we reached the Sargasso, we had only five. We watched the buoys on the radar. Jim and I took shifts following them. And they disappeared. God, was I angry! All that driving.”