Fishing for Eels

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For many people in many places, for most of human history, it was the fish, the eel. Eels were even used as currency at times in parts of europe. In england, you could pay your rent in eels. The village where i grew up by fleet owed 325 eels a year to their nearest monastery. Japan obviously has a long history with eels. And eels were big in the americas too, when the mayflower arrived in the us.

Where eels come from is a surprisingly difficult question to answer, in large part because scientists have never actually seen them reproduce in the wild. Gastropod explains why eels are somehow still so mysterious.

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