Still Life with Eels

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, ecology, fisheries, eels, poaching

When I was a child we visited tide pools in southern California, where my brothers and I would collect not only shells but a few living starfish, which we salted and dried for display. Sometimes we saw people using a putty knife to pry abalones off the rocks, which they would take home and cook to eat. I remember my mother telling us, "Don't take too many things. Leave some for others. If everyone takes these things, one day there will be none left." At the time I couldn't imagine that.

That was more than sixty years ago. About twenty years later the tide pools bore signs forbidding collecting. A few years after that they were closed; visiting was prohibited. Too much had been taken, and the sea life needed to recover. To date, the pools haven't been re-opened.

Now, living near the east coast, primarily the shores of New Jersey and Delaware, I find precious few seashells when we go to the ocean. Not being a fisherman, I don't notice the prevalence of fish, but others tell me that catching your limit takes longer than it used to. In certain seasons we do see fish in the rivers, but one thing I have never seen: eels. They migrate at night, and only in certain seasons. Anyway, if I am out at night, it is to do astronomy, not to look for animals. I am told that, during the seasons of migration, there are a great many eels, an uncountable multitude. Yet, fisheries reports indicate that what we see today is a tiny fraction of the numbers seen just one or two generations ago.

So, there are still eels. After reading Slippery Beast: A True Crime Natural History, with Eels by Ellen Ruppel Shell, I wonder, how close are we to exterminating them? The title of this image is the title of this review: Still Life with Eels. For the time being.

The fashion for eating eels comes and goes. Right now unagi (the Japanese word for Eel, and the currently popular name for eels-for-eating, particularly in sushi) is wildly popular. So popular that around half the unagi eaten around the world, particularly in Japan and America, originated with poached elvers.

Why do I say "originated with"? Eels have an astounding life cycle, more like a butterfly than a vertebrate. In early works of natural history, several different species were named, but they were all eventually found to be stages in the life of the eel.

This diagram, from ResearchGate, is worth considering in detail:

Begin at upper right, with spawning. This has never been seen, so the drawing is speculative. For American and European eels, spawning takes place in the Sargasso Sea. The eel larva is at first a tiny transparent thing a lot like a flatworm, called a leptocephalus, which means "small head". Nobody knows what they eat. Once they get a little bigger they become rounder but remain transparent, so they are called "glass eels". In this form they migrate from somewhere in the Sargasso Sea to the mouth of a river, a distance of 2,000 to 4,000 miles. Near the end of this journey they transform into elvers and begin to migrate upstream. Whether they go fully into freshwater or remain in an estuarine environment, they transform again into yellow eels. After a few years, for males, or up to thirty years for females, they become adults as silver eels and begin to migrate downstream. From this time they do not eat until they reach the Sargasso Sea to spawn. After spawning, the emaciated adults presumably die and sink to the ocean floor, or get snarfed up by carnivorous fish on the way down.

American and European eels haven't been successfully induced to spawn in captivity. Hormone treatments have rarely made a female produce eggs, and the eggs can be fertilized by suitably treated males, but the larvae don't live more than a matter of hours or a few days. However, the Chinese have perfected methods for raising river-caught elvers to adult size. This has led to a still-growing trade in elvers. The price has followed a roller-coaster as the market has shifted over the decades. The price of elvers is in the thousands of dollars per pound range at present. Eel dealers carefully, but very quickly!, send them to the Chinese eel farms. The adult eels are re-imported to America or Europe.

Elver prices are so high that poaching abounds. The Fish & Wildlife Service in America have been able to make a little dent in the trade, but are nowhere near stopping it. This is complicated by treaties with Native American tribes, which assert their rights over the fisheries in their territories. However, in Maine in particular, where the book is focused, the quantity of elvers fished by non-Natives, under licensed quotas, is many times greater than the Native American fishery. The fact remains that the biomass of American eels is probably less than 1/10th what it was thirty or forty years ago, and much, much less than it was in pre-Colonial times. Like nearly every fish stock worldwide, only a few percent remains. Humans love to eat fish, and we are loving them to extinction.

Ms Shell writes of the actions and attitudes of many players and stakeholders in this drama, including an American who is usually just known as "Sara", who has succeeded in setting up an eel farm in America, where many had failed in the past. Also including some of the eel experts who happen to also be leading poachers…or they were, prior to being prosecuted and in some cases, jailed. There are still too many prominent folks who say there are more than enough eels. To anyone who isn't profiting from the trade in elvers and eels, this is clearly not so. The book ends in ambiguity and hope.

Before closing, I need to correct a misapprehension by the author about sushi. Like many Americans, she thinks of sushi as raw fish. That is actually sashimi. Sushi, broadly speaking, is "rice plus seaweed plus lots of other things, served cold." Some of those "other things" include a few kinds of sashimi. At a sashimi restaurant they don't usually serve sushi, just a few kinds of fish with rice on the side and other side ingredients. Even there, eel is not served raw. Very few kinds of fish are served raw, and shellfish such as shrimp, and also octopus and squid, are always cooked. 

At a sushi restaurant, the raw fish is usually one of several species of tuna, and in American sushi restaurants salmon may also be served raw. I haven't seen salmon served raw in Japan (but I haven't been there for several years, so maybe that has changed). The reason for this care is parasites. Tuna and other predatory fish may have parasitic worms in them, but they are large enough for the sashimi chef to see and to remove. Many kinds of fish have smaller parasites that are harder, or economically impossible, to remove (it's usually done with a hook similar to a crochet hook). Still, the process isn't always perfect. At an Asian buffet restaurant in America that includes sushi, I never take the pieces with raw fish; I don't want to need to be dewormed! Finally, the kinds of sushi called "rolls" usually include vegetables and strips of scrambled eggs, and often contain no fish. A "California roll" has eggs, carrots, avocado, and mushrooms. No fish. So, while unagi sushi is very popular, not many know that the eel is always cooked. It isn't safe to eat raw.