May 19, 2026 • 43 mins
Eels are pretty much objectively unsettling. They’re not quite fish (although they are) and if they’re snakes, they’re messed up snakes (they aren’t). But they’re fascinating too! There are even little cute eels. It’s time you got acquainted with eels!
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I know another podcast that has ruined something I like
to eat.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
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
(00:44):
who inspired this episode.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
David Byrne.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Yeah, it's great show.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Have you seen it?
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Oh yeah, I've seen the last couple of tours.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Yeah. I went to read a new book.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Was, and he started following me.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
No.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Yeah, what uh great book.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Though his memoir is just it's almost too incredible to
believe that that happened to him in his life.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Is it called recounting Crow? Uh?
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Oh boy, No, it's called the Uncool But man, he
really missed an opportunity there.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Yeah. I think more he dodged a bullet.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
Probably so. But I went to read a new book,
Talking Heads. It was.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
But Talking Heads is up next. That's it.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
I just watched Bad Lieutenant all the way through for
the first time. Oh, This is a.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
Good movie, buddy, what a film.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
I've got King of New York next.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
So are you on a kick now for him a
little bit?
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Where'd that come from? Bonnie Prince Billy?
Speaker 1 (02:35):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
Oh have you ever seen King of New York?
Speaker 1 (02:45):
No?
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Oh, dude, it's so good.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Oh good, I can't wait.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
I mean he's one of my favorite filmmakers.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
I'll let you know when I get to that chapter.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
I know he was pretty into drugs. So I've only
a couple of chapters in so far, but it's really good.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Okay, Well, when you get to the chapter called drugs, Colon,
I love them.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
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
(03:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Yeah, twelve foot long eel. That's just amazing.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
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.
(04:24):
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?
Speaker 3 (04:44):
Yeah? Take it though.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
So eels can swim backward just by changing the direction
of the wave. Yes, they make a beeping sound when
they do.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
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,
(05:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
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
(06:02):
down there. Yea.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
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
(06:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
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
(07:01):
more about how they spawn later, because it was a
bit of a mystery for a long long.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
Time and still kind of is in some ways.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
No, they're knife fish. They're closer to a catfish than
an eel.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Sure, so forget those guys pretty much.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
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,
(08:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Yes, be careful though, because they probably will buy you
if you stick your face in their heidi hole.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
Did you really Yeah, yeah, it was It was cool.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Did you see an eel though?
Speaker 2 (09:21):
No?
Speaker 3 (09:21):
But it was a little scary to put your face
down there, you know.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Yeah, yeah, I mean doing that above ground can be
pretty unnerving. Under the sea, that's just scary. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
I felt like Timothy Dalton then Flash Gordon when he
reached his hand into that thing, or.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
I guess Indiana Jones. Didn't he do that in One
of them had spiders everywhere.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
Yeah, they were insects. He had to stick his hand,
I think, reaching for a lever or something.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
Oh yeah, they're gorgeous, gorgeous.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
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
(10:21):
they can reproduce either way, depending on what phase of
life they're in.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
Yeah, beautiful, all right, so there.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
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
(10:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
They're not like after people.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Right, they only get you when you stick your face
in their heidi hole.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
H Yeah, I guess so.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
Yeah, they flamber like.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
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
(11:54):
the gills is where the oxygen is absorbed out of
the water into the circulation.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Those teeth are very sharp.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
But they also.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Yeah, I saw Chriinotoxins also are the reason catfish things hurt.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
Yeah, I feel like we talked about that in our
noodling episode.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
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.
(13:20):
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
(13:42):
heaviest one, right.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
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,
(14:22):
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,
(14:44):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
Why why am I just now learning about this?
Speaker 1 (14:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
All right, I'm looking at it now.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Yeah, and he was telling me like, that's like those
are legitimate measurements, like comparison.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
Well, this is my new favorite homepage.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
That awesome. Yeah, that is so cool, man, Love Brandon.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
We'll have to get a band named Generator or something going.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Oh, that's a good idea to you.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
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?
Speaker 3 (16:25):
These cute little guys look like plants.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
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,
(16:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Yeah, they're so cute too, just lolick up garden eel
and look at their little very serious faces.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
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
(17:41):
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
(18:02):
shaped like a shovel, like if a shovel and a
bucket got together and made it.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
This is what it would look.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
Yeah, I agree, that very very cool.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
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
(18:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Yeah, and still are. Japan loves unagi.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
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,
(19:32):
vitamin A, vitamin D that's hard to come by if
you're not out in the sun. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
B twelve for goats.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Oh really, you cooked it yourself?
Speaker 2 (20:03):
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
(20:27):
kabayaki sauce is used.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Is that right to drill.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Yeah. I think it's also a little thicker too, right,
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
I think it's about the same, but it's just uh,
it's kind of just the sweet stuff.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
It is very good. I agree with you. I nothing
in here really put me off of eel, especially your nagi.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
Hey, that's good for you.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
One of the things you haven't screamed yet. We haven't
reached that part yet.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
No, no, okay.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
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,
(21:21):
which I think ran from the seventeenth century to the
nineteenth century. Those four were soba, sushi, and doctor pepper.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
I know this answer, So you didn't get me this time.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
What is the other one?
Speaker 2 (21:36):
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,
(21:57):
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
(22:18):
you know, trap them and grill them up.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
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?
Speaker 2 (22:44):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
Sure, and then you know, you just bake it in
the oven. I think they're already pre cooked.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Oh gotcha?
Speaker 2 (22:58):
Okay, okay, so you're so they maybe shrunk or something,
but you're basically just heating it up and glazing it.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
I gotcha. Smoke deal sounds kind of good. I would
try smoke deal.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
Yeah, it sounds really good.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
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
(23:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
Is that for real? Oh man? I never wanted to
cuss so bad on the show.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
Like wrap them up? And when was a stick? Was one?
Speaker 1 (24:44):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
Two bindes stick. Yeah, it'd be twenty five or it'd
be sixty. Well we should type it into Josh Clark.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Exactly see, it'd be like, does not compute.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
There needs to be one in there. For Josh Clark calculates.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
It was like, how many eels would it take to
live in the East village for a month?
Speaker 1 (25:19):
That's a good one man, whatever year, ten trillion eels.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
Or how many sticks is that?
Speaker 1 (25:26):
That's a trillion sticks?
Speaker 3 (25:28):
Oh okay, thank you.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
That was an easy one.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
Yeah, that's like six months.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
A quarter of the year.
Speaker 3 (25:48):
Oh yeah, third, Oh god, here we go, a third
a third?
Speaker 2 (25:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
Was pretty interesting, Yeah, super interesting.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Yeah, I mean, should we take a break or should
we talk about the reproduction now?
Speaker 1 (26:43):
I'd say we take a break, man, Okay.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
All right, we're going to talk about how they reproduce
right after this. All right, everybody back to the mystery
(27:18):
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
(27:42):
my opinion. They had a lot of weird opinions and
theories as well.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
Yeah, I mean, you probably should have picked something that
doesn't lay an egg in front of you.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
But yeah, sure, I get what you mean.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
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
(28:52):
no less than Sigmund Freud was one of the one
of the people looking for those eel testes.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
My friend, he was the one who found them.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
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?
(29:30):
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
(29:50):
from two thousand years of not knowing what the heck
was going on to Bam, bam bam, we almost have
it figured out.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
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
(30:19):
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
(30:41):
was the mystery.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
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
(31:03):
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
(31:23):
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
(31:44):
Eve Delage, who probably was quite surprised when he put
one of these things in a tank.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
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,
(32:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
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
(32:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:57):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
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
(33:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:52):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
Sea, for sure. And the reason the Sargasso Sea is
remarkable is it's a sea in the Atlantic.
Speaker 3 (34:16):
Ocean, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
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
(34:39):
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
(35:00):
Schmidt was correct that they do eels do actually mate
in the Sargasso Sea.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
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.
(35:44):
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
(36:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (36:14):
Yeah. Eels are like salmon, please exactly.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
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.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
Now yeah, yeah, what was that word? I remember seeing
it now, catacephalic.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
It's probably wrong, but I'm going to say that authoritatively.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
Okay, I'm screaming out. Yeah I could see that.
Speaker 3 (36:59):
Yeah, they're endangered.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
And then some of this other stuff to come was
a pretty big turn off for me as far as
eating them goes.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
Yeah, I guess that puts me off of eating eels.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
Hey, no pressure bud.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (37:30):
So they you know, the eels that you eat.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
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
(37:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
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
(38:30):
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
(38:50):
prevents an entire species from reproducing for the most part,
and that's why their stocks have died off from those fisheries.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
Yeah, yeah, don't I think we skip the part where like,
didn't they tag eels to track them?
Speaker 1 (39:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
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
(39:31):
then they ship it off to Hong Kong.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
Very nice. Do you know what the third to last
is called?
Speaker 3 (39:37):
Oh is that a word for that? Are you about
to dupe me?
Speaker 1 (39:40):
No? This is for real, chuck, I promise, Okay, what
it's anti penultimate but like ante, like anti chamber antipenultimate.
Speaker 3 (39:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
How great, man? YEI guy, you got anything else about eels?
Speaker 3 (40:16):
No, that's it?
Speaker 1 (40:17):
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,
(40:42):
I'm going to stop eating American or European eels for sure.
Speaker 3 (40:46):
All right, No more unagi for us.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (41:17):
Can you refresh my memory? I don't remember that.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
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.
Speaker 3 (41:31):
Okay, So this is what Alex says.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
But it stains the clothes.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
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
(42:20):
my armpits. But don't do that too often, guys, you'll
end up with unhappy pits.
Speaker 3 (42:24):
But it's a great.
Speaker 2 (42:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (42:44):
And that is Alex.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
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.
Speaker 3 (42:54):
I can just see it.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
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.
Speaker 3 (43:14):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
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.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I know another podcast that has ruined something I like
to eat.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
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
(00:44):
who inspired this episode.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
David Byrne.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Yeah, it's great show.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Have you seen it?
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Oh yeah, I've seen the last couple of tours.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Yeah. I went to read a new book.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Was, and he started following me.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
No.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Yeah, what uh great book.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Though his memoir is just it's almost too incredible to
believe that that happened to him in his life.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Is it called recounting Crow? Uh?
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Oh boy, No, it's called the Uncool But man, he
really missed an opportunity there.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Yeah. I think more he dodged a bullet.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
Probably so. But I went to read a new book,
Talking Heads. It was.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
But Talking Heads is up next. That's it.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
I just watched Bad Lieutenant all the way through for
the first time. Oh, This is a.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
Good movie, buddy, what a film.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
I've got King of New York next.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
So are you on a kick now for him a
little bit?
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Where'd that come from? Bonnie Prince Billy?
Speaker 1 (02:35):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
Oh have you ever seen King of New York?
Speaker 1 (02:45):
No?
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Oh, dude, it's so good.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Oh good, I can't wait.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
I mean he's one of my favorite filmmakers.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
I'll let you know when I get to that chapter.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
I know he was pretty into drugs. So I've only
a couple of chapters in so far, but it's really good.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Okay, Well, when you get to the chapter called drugs, Colon,
I love them.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
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
(03:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Yeah, twelve foot long eel. That's just amazing.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
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.
(04:24):
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?
Speaker 3 (04:44):
Yeah? Take it though.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
So eels can swim backward just by changing the direction
of the wave. Yes, they make a beeping sound when
they do.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
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,
(05:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
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
(06:02):
down there. Yea.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
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
(06:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
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
(07:01):
more about how they spawn later, because it was a
bit of a mystery for a long long.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
Time and still kind of is in some ways.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
No, they're knife fish. They're closer to a catfish than
an eel.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Sure, so forget those guys pretty much.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
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,
(08:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Yes, be careful though, because they probably will buy you
if you stick your face in their heidi hole.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
Did you really Yeah, yeah, it was It was cool.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Did you see an eel though?
Speaker 2 (09:21):
No?
Speaker 3 (09:21):
But it was a little scary to put your face
down there, you know.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Yeah, yeah, I mean doing that above ground can be
pretty unnerving. Under the sea, that's just scary. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
I felt like Timothy Dalton then Flash Gordon when he
reached his hand into that thing, or.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
I guess Indiana Jones. Didn't he do that in One
of them had spiders everywhere.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
Yeah, they were insects. He had to stick his hand,
I think, reaching for a lever or something.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
Oh yeah, they're gorgeous, gorgeous.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
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
(10:21):
they can reproduce either way, depending on what phase of
life they're in.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
Yeah, beautiful, all right, so there.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
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
(10:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
They're not like after people.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Right, they only get you when you stick your face
in their heidi hole.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
H Yeah, I guess so.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
Yeah, they flamber like.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
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
(11:54):
the gills is where the oxygen is absorbed out of
the water into the circulation.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Those teeth are very sharp.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
But they also.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Yeah, I saw Chriinotoxins also are the reason catfish things hurt.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
Yeah, I feel like we talked about that in our
noodling episode.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
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.
(13:20):
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
(13:42):
heaviest one, right.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
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,
(14:22):
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,
(14:44):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
Why why am I just now learning about this?
Speaker 1 (14:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
All right, I'm looking at it now.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Yeah, and he was telling me like, that's like those
are legitimate measurements, like comparison.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
Well, this is my new favorite homepage.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
That awesome. Yeah, that is so cool, man, Love Brandon.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
We'll have to get a band named Generator or something going.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Oh, that's a good idea to you.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
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?
Speaker 3 (16:25):
These cute little guys look like plants.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
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,
(16:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Yeah, they're so cute too, just lolick up garden eel
and look at their little very serious faces.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
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
(17:41):
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
(18:02):
shaped like a shovel, like if a shovel and a
bucket got together and made it.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
This is what it would look.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
Yeah, I agree, that very very cool.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
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
(18:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Yeah, and still are. Japan loves unagi.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
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,
(19:32):
vitamin A, vitamin D that's hard to come by if
you're not out in the sun. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
B twelve for goats.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Oh really, you cooked it yourself?
Speaker 2 (20:03):
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
(20:27):
kabayaki sauce is used.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Is that right to drill.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Yeah. I think it's also a little thicker too, right,
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
I think it's about the same, but it's just uh,
it's kind of just the sweet stuff.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
It is very good. I agree with you. I nothing
in here really put me off of eel, especially your nagi.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
Hey, that's good for you.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
One of the things you haven't screamed yet. We haven't
reached that part yet.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
No, no, okay.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
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,
(21:21):
which I think ran from the seventeenth century to the
nineteenth century. Those four were soba, sushi, and doctor pepper.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
I know this answer, So you didn't get me this time.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
What is the other one?
Speaker 2 (21:36):
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,
(21:57):
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
(22:18):
you know, trap them and grill them up.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
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?
Speaker 2 (22:44):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
Sure, and then you know, you just bake it in
the oven. I think they're already pre cooked.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Oh gotcha?
Speaker 2 (22:58):
Okay, okay, so you're so they maybe shrunk or something,
but you're basically just heating it up and glazing it.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
I gotcha. Smoke deal sounds kind of good. I would
try smoke deal.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
Yeah, it sounds really good.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
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
(23:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
Is that for real? Oh man? I never wanted to
cuss so bad on the show.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
Like wrap them up? And when was a stick? Was one?
Speaker 1 (24:44):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
Two bindes stick. Yeah, it'd be twenty five or it'd
be sixty. Well we should type it into Josh Clark.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Exactly see, it'd be like, does not compute.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
There needs to be one in there. For Josh Clark calculates.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
It was like, how many eels would it take to
live in the East village for a month?
Speaker 1 (25:19):
That's a good one man, whatever year, ten trillion eels.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
Or how many sticks is that?
Speaker 1 (25:26):
That's a trillion sticks?
Speaker 3 (25:28):
Oh okay, thank you.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
That was an easy one.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
Yeah, that's like six months.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
A quarter of the year.
Speaker 3 (25:48):
Oh yeah, third, Oh god, here we go, a third
a third?
Speaker 2 (25:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
Was pretty interesting, Yeah, super interesting.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Yeah, I mean, should we take a break or should
we talk about the reproduction now?
Speaker 1 (26:43):
I'd say we take a break, man, Okay.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
All right, we're going to talk about how they reproduce
right after this. All right, everybody back to the mystery
(27:18):
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
(27:42):
my opinion. They had a lot of weird opinions and
theories as well.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
Yeah, I mean, you probably should have picked something that
doesn't lay an egg in front of you.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
But yeah, sure, I get what you mean.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
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
(28:52):
no less than Sigmund Freud was one of the one
of the people looking for those eel testes.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
My friend, he was the one who found them.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
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?
(29:30):
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
(29:50):
from two thousand years of not knowing what the heck
was going on to Bam, bam bam, we almost have
it figured out.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
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
(30:19):
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
(30:41):
was the mystery.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
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
(31:03):
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
(31:23):
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
(31:44):
Eve Delage, who probably was quite surprised when he put
one of these things in a tank.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
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,
(32:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
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
(32:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:57):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
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
(33:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:52):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
Sea, for sure. And the reason the Sargasso Sea is
remarkable is it's a sea in the Atlantic.
Speaker 3 (34:16):
Ocean, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
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
(34:39):
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
(35:00):
Schmidt was correct that they do eels do actually mate
in the Sargasso Sea.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
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.
(35:44):
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
(36:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (36:14):
Yeah. Eels are like salmon, please exactly.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
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.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
Now yeah, yeah, what was that word? I remember seeing
it now, catacephalic.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
It's probably wrong, but I'm going to say that authoritatively.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
Okay, I'm screaming out. Yeah I could see that.
Speaker 3 (36:59):
Yeah, they're endangered.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
And then some of this other stuff to come was
a pretty big turn off for me as far as
eating them goes.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
Yeah, I guess that puts me off of eating eels.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
Hey, no pressure bud.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (37:30):
So they you know, the eels that you eat.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
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
(37:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
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
(38:30):
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
(38:50):
prevents an entire species from reproducing for the most part,
and that's why their stocks have died off from those fisheries.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
Yeah, yeah, don't I think we skip the part where like,
didn't they tag eels to track them?
Speaker 1 (39:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
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
(39:31):
then they ship it off to Hong Kong.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
Very nice. Do you know what the third to last
is called?
Speaker 3 (39:37):
Oh is that a word for that? Are you about
to dupe me?
Speaker 1 (39:40):
No? This is for real, chuck, I promise, Okay, what
it's anti penultimate but like ante, like anti chamber antipenultimate.
Speaker 3 (39:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
How great, man? YEI guy, you got anything else about eels?
Speaker 3 (40:16):
No, that's it?
Speaker 1 (40:17):
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,
(40:42):
I'm going to stop eating American or European eels for sure.
Speaker 3 (40:46):
All right, No more unagi for us.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (41:17):
Can you refresh my memory? I don't remember that.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
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.
Speaker 3 (41:31):
Okay, So this is what Alex says.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
But it stains the clothes.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
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
(42:20):
my armpits. But don't do that too often, guys, you'll
end up with unhappy pits.
Speaker 3 (42:24):
But it's a great.
Speaker 2 (42:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (42:44):
And that is Alex.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
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.
Speaker 3 (42:54):
I can just see it.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
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.
Speaker 3 (43:14):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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