Eels Don’t Have Sex Until the Last Year of Their Life
Fishing for eels was a primal childhood experience for Patrik Svensson. On summer nights his father would take him down to a small stream near their home in Sweden. It was a magical place, surrounded by willow trees, with bats swooping through the moonlight. They barely talked as they set their fishing lines along the bank. “It was what me and my father did together. We fished for eels,” he recalls. Back home, Patrik’s mother would toss their catch in the frying pan, but the eels still squirmed and wriggled even after they were chopped up, with no heads. “I always found it fascinating and a little scary,” he says. “It made me think, what’s really the difference between life and death?”
That’s just one of the many questions that haunted Svensson for decades. And he’s far from alone in his obsession. The eel is one of the most mysterious creatures on Earth, and for centuries it confounded scientists, from Aristotle to Freud. No one could figure out how—or where—they reproduced. Or whether there were actually male and female eels. Or how they managed to transform from saltwater to freshwater animals and then back to saltwater “silver eels” at the end of
