Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you should know about Eel.
I know another podcast that has ruined something I like to eat.
But now I can what did it ruin? Or why? How? What? What? Part? How about this? When we get to the part where you're like, this ruined eel for me, shout scream at the top of your lungs. Okay, okay. I want to give a hat tip to David Byrne via you Me who inspired this episode.
David Byrne.
Yeah, d David Byrne you me. He was watching David Byrne videos. He's on tour and I think she's going to see him.
Yeah, it's great show.
Have you seen it?
Oh yeah, I've seen the last couple of tours.
It's it's great, awesome. So he apparently he was talking about a book he was reading about Eels and how fascinating it was. So that kicked off the idea for an episode on Eels.
Yeah. I went to read a new book.
I just finished my book, Cameron Crowe's Memoir, which is fantastic, I'm sure. And by the way, I commented on his Instagram about what a great book it.
Was, and he started following me.
No.
Yeah, and I got to think that it was either an accident or maybe he listens to stuff you should know. I don't see why he would randomly just be like, I'll follow anyone who says they like my book, right, So, I don't know, Cameron Crow, if you're listening, it's pretty exciting for us.
Yeah, what uh great book.
Though his memoir is just it's almost too incredible to believe that that happened to him in his life.
Is it called recounting Crow? Uh?
Oh boy, No, it's called the Uncool But man, he really missed an opportunity there.
Yeah. I think more he dodged a bullet.
Probably so. But I went to read a new book, Talking Heads. It was.
I had two books in my hand, the Talking Heads book and Abel Ferrara's memoir The Filmmaker, and I went with the Abel ferrar just because Bonnie Prince Billy recommended it and it's shorter.
But Talking Heads is up next. That's it.
I just watched Bad Lieutenant all the way through for the first time. Oh, This is a.
Good movie, buddy, what a film.
I've got King of New York next.
So are you on a kick now for him a little bit?
Yeah?
Where'd that come from? Bonnie Prince Billy?
Yeah, No, I don't remember. I think I just ran across Bad Lieutenant. And I've known about it since I was a teenager and it's never really watched it.
Oh have you ever seen King of New York?
No?
Oh, dude, it's so good.
Oh good, I can't wait.
Yeah.
I mean he's one of my favorite filmmakers.
Great. Yeah, Apparently there's lots of rumors that Harvey Kitel actually was on all the drugs he was supposed to be on on Bad Lieutenant.
I'll let you know when I get to that chapter.
And I saw someone say, like, no, he actually wasn't he's just that good of an actor. But that Abel Ferrara and the rest of the crew probably were on all those same drugs while they were shooting it.
I know he was pretty into drugs. So I've only a couple of chapters in so far, but it's really good.
Okay, Well, when you get to the chapter called drugs, Colon, I love them.
Let me know, all right, all that to say is that we're talking about eels, and we'll get right into it. If you're an eel, if you want to claim to be an eel, you got to have certain qualifications. You can't just be like a sea snake or an electric eel, which isn't an eel by the way. You have to
be a member of the order Anguilliforms or Anguilliformis. Twenty families of eels, one hundred and eleven gen era, more than eight hundred species, ranging from just about four inches to those big old morey eels sometimes up to twelve feet.
Yeah, twelve foot long eel. That's just amazing.
Yeah.
The one thing that they all have in common is that they have long bodies that are typically worm like. They don't have pelvic fins, right, so, yeah, the ones that you would have developed head you descended from water hippos. That's whales. A lot of them don't have pectoral fins. Some of them do have the dorsal fin on the back. But essentially they're just like worms or snakes, like slithering through the water, and that actually is exactly what they're doing.
They're slithering in a wave like motion. That's how they make their way because again, they don't really have fins. This to me is one of the facts of the podcast. Do you know what I'm talking about?
Yeah? Take it though.
So eels can swim backward just by changing the direction of the wave. Yes, they make a beeping sound when they do.
Oh man, that's amazing. I mean they got to let everyone know. It's like I can't I can't see where I'm going. Everyone eel coming through.
Yeah. Also, I just want to take a second for a ps A. If you drive a truck that makes a beeping sound when it backs up, never ever just sit there idling with your reverse gear and reverse. People are allowed to do that. Yes, you mean I used to live next to it was like a nursing home, I guess, and they like we lived on the side of their like delivery area, and dudes would just do that, just sit there with with their truck and reverse not moving. Yeah, at like six in the morning.
No, all right, I agree. Eels had that smooth, slippery skin and it is coated in a slime. It's a protective slime. It helps them with they're swimming. It makes them very streamlined, and it also helps regulate how much water is in their bodies, which is pretty unusual. And they're predatory, like they're eating other fish basically while they're down there. Yea.
What something else that's very neat about eels is that they don't like they're not boring little baby eels and then they grow up into big twelve foot long, two hundred and fifty pound eels. They actually go through stages of metamorphosis like the butterfly does. Yeah, Like they don't look anything like an eel when they're born, and as they grow they actually change shape and color in addition to size. They also very frequently will move from like
the ocean to freshwater creeks far inland. Like, there's a lot of great stuff that eels do that we just had overlooked for a very long time.
Yeah, I mean there's some fun, really fun stuff coming. They're basically solitary. I think there's a couple that we'll talk about later that hang out in the hundreds or thousands, but generally, yeah, like, if you're an eel of size, you're gonna be swimming around by yourself, backing up by yourself, beeping by yourself. They migrate, and you know, we'll talk more about how they spawn later, because it was a bit of a mystery for a long long.
Time and still kind of is in some ways.
Yeah, but they do migrate to a spawning area, and they think they use the urtht magnetic fields. They use magnetite in their bodies to navigate.
Yeah, and they're not the only animals that do, so we don't know for a fact. We just know that there is magnetite in their heads and that that is probably what's going on because it's so spectacular the migrations that they go. That's essentially the only explanation we have on hand.
That's right.
If they are in tropical areas, warmer waters, where they get migrate to spawn is probably nearish. But if they're in the colder areas, it seems like they migrate to the warmer areas to spawn, so they may have to go a long way.
Yeah, it's like how people in the Caribbean they don't go on vacation because they live on vacation. That's right. And like you said, electric eels aren't eels, and there's really not a whole lot else to say about electric eels really.
No, they're knife fish. They're closer to a catfish than an eel.
Sure, so forget those guys pretty much.
We really looked too. We're like electric kills. We got to find out even though they're not eels, they've got to be kind of interesting. Not really, so sorry everybody.
Yeah, but what is interesting is the more a eel. This is the sort of the most famous of the ocean dwelling eels, the saltwater eels, member of the family Muraneda fifteen genera. There two hundred species makes up about twenty five percent of all the eels, and they live like you know, if you've ever been snorkeling or scuba diving,
you probably haven't seen one during the day. But if you've ever gone and put your face in a heidi hole in that coral, maybe you could see one because that's where they like to hide.
Yes, be careful though, because they probably will buy you if you stick your face in their heidi hole.
Yeah.
I did that a little bit in Belize. I was asked to snorkel fishing guys with this. There were spearfishing and stuff, and I was like, like with spear guns. I was like, can you teach me? They're like, come on, just follow along. And then you know, he told me dive down there and put your face in that hole and tell me what he saw.
Did you really Yeah, yeah, it was It was cool.
I was like, I was trying to do it like they did it, you know, sure, but I didn't get anything they did, but I didn't.
Did you see an eel though?
No?
But it was a little scary to put your face down there, you know.
Yeah, yeah, I mean doing that above ground can be pretty unnerving. Under the sea, that's just scary. Yeah.
I felt like Timothy Dalton then Flash Gordon when he reached his hand into that thing, or.
I guess Indiana Jones. Didn't he do that in One of them had spiders everywhere.
Yeah, they were insects. He had to stick his hand, I think, reaching for a lever or something.
Yeah, so great. One of my favorites are it's a type of mori. It's called the ribbon eel. Did you look pictures up of these guys.
Oh yeah, they're gorgeous, gorgeous.
So there. They are very appropriately named. They're very flat and wide. They do look like ribbons, especially when they're undulating through the water. But one of the cool things is is that they're born as males blue and yellow males, and then all of a sudden they go boop, I'm in all yellow female now yeah, check me out. And they can reproduce either way, depending on what phase of life they're in.
Yeah, they're just incredible, very bright, almost fluorescent like, kind of one of those you know, undersea colors that just don't feel like they should exist in nature, but it definitely exists in the ocean.
Yeah, beautiful, all right, so there.
If you know a more, you know, they have a great smile. They're known for those those really scary looking teeth. They have two sets of jaws. The second set, the fairyngeal jaws, faces backwards to kind of lock you in and keep you from escaping if they have you in their grasp. Yeah, but they're not dead or not after you. You don't need to be afraid of the moray eel like if they if they get you in the water, it's probably because you're in there at night and it's obviously an accident.
They're not like after people.
Right, they only get you when you stick your face in their heidi hole.
H Yeah, I guess so.
One of the reasons why people are like man, those things look really aggressive. Is because they show their teeth a lot. And that's not because they're trying to scare you or because they're really proud of their teeth. It's because they lack opercula, which are those plate like covers that go over fish gills, you know that they kind of go back and forth on.
Yeah, they flamber like.
That Mondy python sketching with the Meaning of Life where their goldfish and they're moving their hands. They were simulating opercula, and one of the things opercula does is it regulates and kind of moves water over the gills. Well, the mores don't have that, so they have to get a lot of water through their mouth and then that's how they funnel the water through the gills. And of course the gills is where the oxygen is absorbed out of the water into the circulation.
Yeah, for sure. So that's when you're gonna see the teeth. Like I said, you're not gonna get bitten most likely, but if you do, it's not going to be fun for you.
Those teeth are very sharp.
It's a very painful bite apparently because it punctures very deep, so it could always get like tendons and nerves and stuff. And while they are not venomous, they do that slime. They have slime in their mouths as well, and it's a substance called hema glutenin, and it causes red blood cells to clump up.
But they also.
They think they generate something called chriinotoxin, so that destroys red blood cells. So all of that stuff is a why it's painful, and it can be like super prone to infection. Those teeth can break off in your wound. It's really not good.
Yeah, I saw Chriinotoxins also are the reason catfish things hurt.
Uh.
Yeah, I feel like we talked about that in our noodling episode.
That makes sense. Yeah, that's like sticking your face in the Heidi hole, but using your arm instead of your face. That's right. So the more is a type of ocean eel, and you can kind of divide eels into ocean and fresh water as we'll see, although ocean eels are far and away the largest in number and type, right. Yeah. One of the other big big I guess ocean eels is called the conger from family congrete A, and they are like deep water dwellers like three thousand feet below
the surface. Some of them hang out in some rocky areas like More's maybe around coral reefs. But the thing that's remarkable about the European conger is that that's the heaviest one, right.
Yeah, they're not as long and slender as the more they're they're still long and snakelike, but they're they're rounder. Like the biggest one recorded as two hundred and forty two pounds, Yeah, which is you know, it's it's a game fish. So if you got a two hundred and forty two, that's a pretty good catch that day.
Yeah, it was like how much a couchways? Yeah, yeah, Oh, I'm so glad I said that because I've been forgetting just to mention this. So our dear awesome friend Brandon Reid, right, he created he's our webmaster everybody. He runs and created stuff you should know dot com Yeah and pal, yes, and great great pal. He created a website called Josh Clark Calculates and you can go to Josh Clark Calculates
dot com. I didn't look it up and get this, so you can basically describe anything in a measurement of whatever you want so somebody is a big Max tall, so you can select big Max Olympic swimming pools. All the stuff that we've ever used to essentially describe the size or shape or volume of something you can now do on Josh Clark calculates dot com.
Why why am I just now learning about this?
Because I kept forgetting to mention it and he showed it to me before. I guess he showed it to me in Chicago when he came to the show.
All right, I'm looking at it now.
Josh Clark calculates the weirdest way to measure absolutely anything, right, the Space Then the example in the homepage is the Space Shuttle Endeavor has the speed of how many washing washing machines? And he press a button and it says, beat boob, the Space Shuttle Endeavor has the speed of twenty two thousand, seven hundred and seventy eight washing machines.
Yeah, and he was telling me like, that's like those are legitimate measurements, like comparison.
Well, this is my new favorite homepage.
That awesome. Yeah, that is so cool, man, Love Brandon.
We'll have to get a band named Generator or something going.
Oh, that's a good idea to you.
All Right, that was a lot of fun. I feel like we should take a break. Everyone can go visit that website and calculate some stuff and we'll be back with more about eels.
Okay, Chuck, we're back, and now we're going to talk about my favorite kind of eel. Is this your favorite kind of eel? Uh? Yeah?
These cute little guys look like plants.
Yeah, so I've seen these before. I had no idea there were eels, but they're like, yeah, little worm like stems sticking up out of the sandy bottom, waving kind of back and forth with the current. And there's so many of them it does it looks like just kind of a field of plants. But if you zoom in, they are these cute little eels with cute little faces. Yeah, just eating plankton that goes past, and they spend most of their lives cemented in the sandy bottom, even though
they're able to get out and move free. That's just kind of where they live. It's also their heidi.
Yeah, they're called garden eels, and I think when they get startled, they their whole body goes back in their little burrow. But yeah, these are the ones that can hang out together, so it look like a little field of seagrass and beat thousands of these little guys just waving around.
Yeah, they're so cute too, just lolick up garden eel and look at their little very serious faces.
Yeah, if you are an eel that's living deep in the ocean, you're not going to be one of the colorful ones. You're probably going to be black or dull gray. And the gulp or eel is another one that you should look up when it's safe to do so. This is it's also called the pelican eel. They're all over the world, basically in tropical and temperate climates, and they are very deep dwellers, like five to ten thousand feet
below the surface, and they look crazy. They are a few feet long, and their jaw is really the star of the show. It's a lot bigger than their skull and it can unhinge and act as a scoop. It looks sort of like well, I mean, they call it pelican for a and it looks pelican s but its shaped like a shovel, like if a shovel and a bucket got together and made it.
This is what it would look.
Like yeah, and it doesn't always look like that, right, so when it changes shape it looks extremely alien. It's really neat. The video I saw was Gulper eel balloons its massive jaw a nautilus live and it's just amazing to watch that thing do its thing.
Yeah, I agree, that very very cool.
This is this next section to me is kind of one of the most astounding things that I didn't know about. It is the fact that eels have a real big significance in human history, and especially in medieval Europe. But we're talking mainly about the American eel, the European eel, and the Japanese eel. These are fresh water eels. They go to spawn in the oceans, but they live in fresh water, and they were a huge, huge, huge source of food for a very long time in a lot of parts of the world.
Yeah, and still are. Japan loves unagi.
Oh yeah.
So yeah. One of the reasons why they played such a role as a food source around the world is that number one, they were easy to come by, like literally, they're swimming around in streams and rivers all over the northern hemisphere. And in addition to that, they're really really nutritious. It turns out high in protein, lots of vitamin B twelve, vitamin A, vitamin D that's hard to come by if you're not out in the sun. Yeah.
B twelve for goats.
Yeah, yes, And only three hundred and seventy five calories for an eel fil a, which is actually pretty new calorie dnse for a fish. But it's it's very good for you too.
Yeah.
A lot of good fat and protein in there as well. And that unagi that I used to love to eat. I would cook it up myself. It was delicious.
Oh really, you cooked it yourself?
Yeah, I think I talked about this before. There's a near the Decab farmers market near where I live. There's the I think it's cool stand, the first Oriental market, and they sell eel as well as lots of like kitchen wars and kind of cool stuff from Japan. But sure, yeah, you can go get eel there out of the fridge and bake it in your oven and coat it with some I used taraaki, but I think traditionally is the kabayaki sauce is used.
Is that right to drill.
To grill those things up and it's I mean, kabayaki is basically the same. I think it just doesn't have like I think it's like a stripped down taraiyaki. It doesn't have ginger and garlic in it.
Yeah. I think it's also a little thicker too, right, I don't know.
I think it's about the same, but it's just uh, it's kind of just the sweet stuff.
It is very good. I agree with you. I nothing in here really put me off of eel, especially your nagi.
Hey, that's good for you.
One of the things you haven't screamed yet. We haven't reached that part yet.
No, no, okay.
So one of the reasons zunagi is, I guess noteworthy in Japanese culture. One as far as sushi goes, it's one of the rare parts of sushi that's ever cooked, like across the board. Yeah. And then number two, it's called one of the big four foods of the Edo period, which I think ran from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century. Those four were soba, sushi, and doctor pepper.
I know this answer, So you didn't get me this time.
What is the other one?
The other one is timpura and you mentioned it's the only one that's like routinely cooked because you have to because eel blood is toxic to human so you have to grill that stuff up just right. Yeah, this is one of the things that is dound to me. Is I didn't know that it was such a big deal in the northeastern US in eastern Canada before and after colonization,
so indigenous peoples loved eel. I think eel's made up about a quarter more than a quarter of the fish found in streams along the coast of the of northern northeastern Northern America. Yeah, and you know, you could smoke it and carry it with you on the trail, you could salt it and cure it, and obviously you could you know, trap them and grill them up.
Yeah. I think one of the things that I've read somewhere is that like an eel file at is it does not taste fishy. I saw it compared to a taste of venison. Even I've my experience with eel has never been like that. It's always been like a little bit like on on sushi. Have Did you ever eat like a big hunk of eel at once?
No, It's always just been, you know, like you would eat on sushi, but they come in a in a long eel like package.
Sure, and then you know, you just bake it in the oven. I think they're already pre cooked.
Oh gotcha?
Okay, okay, so you're so they maybe shrunk or something, but you're basically just heating it up and glazing it.
I gotcha. Smoke deal sounds kind of good. I would try smoke deal.
Yeah, it sounds really good.
So it wasn't just the indigenous peoples of North America who were eating eel. The people in Europe at the same time were crazy for eel and had been for centuries and centuries. Apparently they've found old willow traps, which are basically like woven baskets that are easy to get into and hard to get out of. That eel would swim into and they'd be like, oh no, not again, and they would become smoked or salted or dried and very interestingly chuck. They would often be used as currency.
That's how valued eel were, but also how common they were too.
Yeah, this is the fact that the episode for me had no idea that in medieval times, not at medieval times, but during medieval times, about half a million dried eels were used to pay rent in England every single year.
Yeah, for all sorts of debts. And I mean it continued on for a very long time. And to kill a mockingbird, Walter Cunningham from Old Saram pays Atticus Finch and a thousand live eels at one point.
Is that for real? Oh man? I never wanted to cuss so bad on the show.
No. And the reason why that's a giveaway, Chuck, is that I said live eels. Nobody wanted the live eels. They wanted them prepared, smoked, yeah, dried, and then depending on how many were put together. Did you see like there were different names for like ten eels together, Yeah, twenty five eels together.
Like wrap them up? And when was a stick? Was one?
Uh huh, that's like twenty five okay, and then uh no, that's ten. Yeah, a bind is twenty five, And those are basically they were treated like denominations, like I'll give you a bind of eels for that can of doctor pepper.
Two bindes stick. Yeah, it'd be twenty five or it'd be sixty. Well we should type it into Josh Clark.
Exactly see, it'd be like, does not compute.
There needs to be one in there. For Josh Clark calculates.
It was like, how many eels would it take to live in the East village for a month?
That's a good one man, whatever year, ten trillion eels.
Or how many sticks is that?
That's a trillion sticks?
Oh okay, thank you.
That was an easy one.
They were very popular food wise though, during church holidays and during fasting seasons because and this is like up to like a few months out of the year or more than that one hundred and twenty days.
Yeah, that's like six months.
A quarter of the year.
Oh yeah, third, Oh god, here we go, a third a third?
All right, I'm gonna type it into your website again. You could not eat meat, but you could eat fish during those fasting season. So because there were so many eels, they were you know, it's a pretty attractive meal.
Yeah, a nice meal of eels, that's right. There was one other reason too, that we'll see why they were highly thought of for fasting during Christian or Catholic I guess feast days was that they are have long been considered a sexual because as we'll see that, like people have no idea how they've reproduced. And I thought that.
Was pretty interesting, Yeah, super interesting.
Like regular fish that have sex would just make you think of nothing but sex while you're eating them, I guess. But at eel you're all good.
Yeah, I mean, should we take a break or should we talk about the reproduction now?
I'd say we take a break, man, Okay.
All right, we're going to talk about how they reproduce right after this. All right, everybody back to the mystery of eel reproduction. In the old days, in the classical Mediterranean era, they had all kinds of crazy ideas about how eels reproduce because they seemed to just appear. No one ever saw them doing it. No one ever saw eel eggs. People had cut eels open and found no reproductive organs. Seems to be unusually preoccupied with this, in
my opinion. They had a lot of weird opinions and theories as well.
Right, sure, sure, but imagine if, like, you know how much cow stay chicken. Okay, humans eat a lot of chicken. Imagine if while you're eating chicken, you're like, where the hell do you chickens come from? No one has any idea like the chicken is solicious, but I have no idea how chickens are born.
Yeah, I mean, you probably should have picked something that doesn't lay an egg in front of you.
But yeah, sure, I get what you mean.
But I think that's another reason why the mystery is so deep. As they're like, yeah, chickens lay eggs, pigs, they'd love to do it. Like they're all like they knew how everything else came about. Basically, eels, they're like, I guess they just spontaneously generate.
Yeah, for sure.
Finally, in seventeen seventy seven, there was an Italian surgeon and researcher named Carlo Mundine and he finally don't ask me how, but he finally located the ovaries of an eel, and they for decades no one could replicate that fact. And then eventually they found the testicles as well. And no less than Sigmund Freud was one of the one of the people looking for those eel testes.
My friend, he was the one who found them.
Yeah, I mean this is earlier in his career, but yeah, he dissected four hundred eels. I guess he on the four hundred and first found him.
It's always the last deal you look in. Yeah, so yeah, So Freud was the person who identified for the first time. People have been thinking about this for two thousand years at least, how eels reproduced. But at the same time they were like, great, they have gonads, they have ovaries, where do they like Why don't we ever see them using these things? Why don't we ever see their babies? This is all very weird. So the mystery continued even after Freud, although it was really kind of starting to
heat up around that time. I think Freud found the gonads in eighteen seventy six, and within a couple of decades. I think within a decade they had far more material to work with than they had. So, like it went from two thousand years of not knowing what the heck was going on to Bam, bam bam, we almost have it figured out.
Yeah for sure, Like we knew that they met morphosize. We knew that those glass eels, they're basically transparent little babies. They would show up in coastal waters every spring, and they knew that they shurned into adolescent eels they're called elvers, and they know that they would eventually turn color and swim up rivers, and they knew they would eventually become yellow eels and that they love to eat those things,
and then eventually they would become silver eels. Is the final stop on the eel train, and that is when they developed the equipment to reproduce and go up river into the ocean. But the part between silver eels going from the river and then the glass eel floating around was the mystery.
Yeah, but if you put those two things together, like, Okay, the glass eels show up on the coast, the silver eels swim out to sea, seems like that these freshwater eels breeding grounds are somewhere out there in the ocean.
It's gotta be right. Yeah. So before that, there was this idea that there were these little things, almost plankton like organisms, or I think they were plankton, which apparently the definition of plankton is any floating sea life that just gets moved along by the current, can't move around itself.
There were these little tiny floating I guess they were shaped like willow leaves, and they were identified as leptocephalous Revostis rostras, and they thought this was a whole different type of fish, and it turned out what they were looking at were the larva of eels. They misidentified them as something and it took like a couple of decades before they were like, no, this is actually eel larva.
And they found out thanks to a French guy named Eve Delage, who probably was quite surprised when he put one of these things in a tank.
Yeah, he put one in a tank and saw it go through every metamorphosis. I guess I would assume he kept getting bigger tanks, unless you had a big one to begin with. But eventually it became a glass, and then an elver, and then about ten years after that, there was an Italian zoologist named Giovanni Battista who saw this happen out in the wild. And so, all right, we really are cooking with gas now, but where do those little silver eels go? Where are they going to
make this larva? They still hadn't figured out that part.
Yeah, once they mature. So there's a Dutch marine biologist named Ernst Johann Schmidt, which is a great Danish name. I think I said Dutch, right, He's a Dane, Sorry, Danish people. He was supported by the Carlsburg Foundation, and yet they were founded by the beer company. Yeah, and they essentially funded scientific expeditions. They funded Ernst Schmidt and he started He just basically set out to figure out this mystery of how silver eels produce the little willow leaf larva.
That's right.
So he started fishing his nets along the coast and he found them in the North Sea. He found them in the Mediterranean, and they were pretty big by this point. So he was like, I don't think this is where
they started because they've grown a little too much. So he got together with some commercial fishing boats, said hey, I could use some help because you guys are all over the Atlantic, and they helped him out, and in nineteen twelve he had a report finally to publish that said, really, these little small larvae and silver eels are, which is the end stage, all the way out in the mid Atlantic, in the middle of nowhere.
Yeah. So he was like, I think that they probably breed in the Sargasso Sea. And he never found them. He never saw that they were in the Sargasso Sea. But it turned out he was correct.
That's right.
Sargasso see apparently is a pretty rich breeding ground for a lot of reasons. One reason and because of the brown sarcasm that floats on top, I think it just creates a sort of a nice, covered, shady habitat. Yeah, and it's not just the eels. I think a lot of things kind of reproduce in the Sargasso.
Sea, for sure. And the reason the Sargasso Sea is remarkable is it's a sea in the Atlantic.
Ocean, yeah, for sure.
And it's kept in place by I think four currents that kind of come together and create a gyre. And in the middle of this gyre is what we call the Sargasso Sea. And it's relatively still compared to the rest of the ocean. It's very high in saline, and it stays pretty warm. It's largely off the coast of the eastern United States, I believe, is where it's mostly situated,
all the way out to the Azores zorusors sure. And it turns out in I think twenty eighteen, a European team led by Rosalind Wright found out that yes, Ernest Schmidt was correct that they do eels do actually mate in the Sargasso Sea.
That's right now, that's those There are other freshwater eels that spawn in other places. Obviously, they don't all go there. I think Japanese eels spawn at these underwater mountains around the Marianna Ridge, which is pretty incredible.
So neat. Yeah, yeah, And then I think African long fin eels spawn in the Indian Ocean. And you might say, like who cares, Like, yeah, it was a mystery, but yeah, think about this. Eels are like halfway up the Rhine in Germany. Yeah, They're like, well, it's time for me to go reproduce, so I'm getting to be that age. They swim all the way down to the Atlantic Ocean, swim all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to the
Sargasso Sea. That's where they mate, and then their little tiny larvae, these little floating plankton, make their way all the way back two Europe again, where they turn into glass eels then elvas, and then swim back up and take their place up the Rhine until they do the same thing. That's a very strange reproductive strategy, but that's what eels do.
Yeah. Eels are like salmon, please exactly.
Yeah, there's a word for it. I can't quite bring to mind. I want to say catacephalic, that might be it. But essentially it's they're born in the ocean, but they live their lives in fresh water.
Now yeah, yeah, what was that word? I remember seeing it now, catacephalic.
It's probably wrong, but I'm going to say that authoritatively.
All right, So today eels the International Union for Conservation of Nature the Red List listen as threatened species. The European eels are critically endangered, and the American, Japanese and New Zealand long fin eels are endangered.
Okay, I'm screaming out. Yeah I could see that.
Yeah, they're endangered.
And then some of this other stuff to come was a pretty big turn off for me as far as eating them goes.
Yeah, I guess that puts me off of eating eels.
Hey, no pressure bud.
American and European eel populations have dropped by more than ninety percent since the nineteen seventies, same with Japanese eel populations. Hydropower turbines and dams is a big reason. We know that they disrupt all sorts of underwater aquatic life, but also overfishing, the loss of wetlands and pollution.
So they you know, the eels that you eat.
And this almost got me back on it. They're raised in aquaculture facilities. They aren't bread in captivity because it's really hard to do as obviously that we've seen. Their reproduction is pretty tricky overall, so if they were to try and do that, they would have to introduce hormones to induce sexual development. Keeping those larvae alive is really difficult in captivity just because of the organic matter that exists in the wild, like they really need that stuff.
So what they do is they capture those little glass eels in the wild and bring them to the farms to raise them to maturity so you can.
Eat them right. And one of the reasons, maybe the reason that American and European eels have dropped by ninety percent since the seventies is that when you're taking these glass eels out of the ocean. Number one, you're preventing that same number of eels from ever growing up to reproduce because they're going to get eaten before they get
a chance to. And two, if eels follow any kind of typical evolutionary strategy, they probably have a ton of larva and a huge percentage of them die off, and the glass eels are the ones that make it so what you're doing is saying, like, thanks for the surviving larva, everybody, We're going to take them and eat them. So that prevents an entire species from reproducing for the most part, and that's why their stocks have died off from those fisheries.
Yeah, yeah, don't I think we skip the part where like, didn't they tag eels to track them?
Yeah, that's how they found out Rosalind Wright in twenty eight That's how they found out. But yeah, I forgot to mention that part.
Yeah, crazy to tag a little eel. Maine, the US state of Maine is the only state that has a glass eel fishing industry. They have license what they're called elverman because remember the elvers is the third to I guess, the penultimate stage, and there are four hundred and twenty five licensed elvermen that can harvest around seventy five hundred pounds between late March and early June every year, and then they ship it off to Hong Kong.
Very nice. Do you know what the third to last is called?
Oh is that a word for that? Are you about to dupe me?
No? This is for real, chuck, I promise, Okay, what it's anti penultimate but like ante, like anti chamber antipenultimate.
Yeah.
I like that. That always reminds me. And I think I mentioned this in the Gary Larson episode the second to the last of the Mohicans cartoon, Yeah, which is just a big line of indigenous I guess Mohicans and the second the last of the one in line. Everyone's facing one way and he just turned around and waving and smiling.
How great, man? YEI guy, you got anything else about eels?
No, that's it?
Okay. Yeah, If you want to know more about eels, I go watch videos about David Byrne and see what books he recommends. You can also visit your local aquarium. You can also go online and visit the website of your local aquarium. There's all sorts of stuff you can do to learn more about eels. And I urge you too, and maybe stop eating them. I'm going to too, Okay, Chuck, really, I'm going to stop eating American or European eels for sure.
All right, No more unagi for us.
No, it's been a while since I had it anyway, so it's not like it's a huge given loss me. All right. Well, since Chuck agreed, that we're both going to give up. Eel, It's time for listener now.
This is from Alex and this is a follow up about the baking soda and coconut oil deodorant from the listener mail. Apparently Alex is sort of an expert on this, so okay, again, you don't tread carefully whenever you're applying anything to your skin and body.
Can you refresh my memory? I don't remember that.
Deodorant basically like baking soda and coconut oil, if you mix together into a paste, can be a good like natural deodorant, Okay, but it can also like chafe your skin and cause outbreaks if you don't get the mix right.
Okay, So this is what Alex says.
I've been doing this for the better part of fifteen years, guys, and have continuously adjusted the recipe to balance what I found to be three main factors, odor eliminating effectiveness, skin reaction, and staining of clothing. Baking soda is responsible for the first two and needs to be carefully balanced to be effective enough while not causing a rash. Coconut oil is commonly used to act as a concentration, reduction and application medium.
But it stains the clothes.
I found that corn starch is an x is excellent and being a neutral alternative. To reduce a concentration of the baking soda, I usually go about equal volumes of the two, then add only enough coconut oil to make a thick paste in a pinch. If I find myself having forgotten to use deodorant, I will moisten my finger and dab it directly in baking soda so that it is only very lightly dusted, and then rub that on my armpits. But don't do that too often, guys, you'll end up with unhappy pits.
But it's a great.
Backup because most people have a box of baking powder open in the fridge and don't care about fingers in it because it's not there for eating. A girlfriend from another lifetime once told me I should start an armpit empire. And by the way, guys, I'm in Puerto Rico, so if you ever feel like coming to do a show in the tropics, would be the first one out telling everyone to buy tickets.
And that is Alex.
Thanks a lot, Alex. Can you just see Alex dipping his fingers in some baking soda and rubbing him on his arm pit and saying, ah, refreshed.
I can just see it.
If you want to be like Alex and give us even more detail about a whatever it is you know a lot about, we would love that. You can send it to us at stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
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