Why We Haven’t Learned More In 101 Years Of Trying

2023-04-27

[public] 15.6K views, 19.0K likes, dislikes audio only

Almost everything we know about the reproductive practices of European eels comes from a genius study conducted more than 100 years ago.

LEARN MORE

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To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:

- European Eel: A long-lived, snakelike fish native to the rivers of Europe.

- Eel, Pie, and Mash: A common meal of poorer Englishmen for the last several centuries.

- Spontaneous Generation: The hypothetical process by which organisms would generate from non-living matter.

- The Eel Question: A matter of great debate for millenia - specifically: how do eels reproduce and where do they come from?

- Sargasso Sea: A region of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Bermuda bounded by four currents forming an ocean gyre that is recognizable by the large presence of Sargassum seaweed.

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CREDITS

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David Goldenberg | Script Writer, Narrator and Director

Lizah van der Aart | Illustration, Video Editing and Animation

Nathaniel Schroeder | Music

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REFERENCES

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Schmidt, J. (1923). The Breeding Places of the Eel. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Containing Papers of a Biological Character, 211, 179–208. https://www.jstor.org/stable/92087

Jarvis, Brooke (2020). Where Do Eels Come From? The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/25/where-do-eels-come-from

Wright, R.M., Piper, A.T., Aarestrup, K. et al. (2022) First direct evidence of adult European eels migrating to their breeding place in the Sargasso Sea. Sci Rep 12, 15362. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-19248-8

Couch, C. (2022) The Utterly Engrossing Search for the Origin of Eels. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-utterly-engrossing-search-for-the-origin-of-eels-180980777/

Paulson, S. (2020). Eels Don’t Have Sex Until the Last Year of Their Life. Nautilus Magazine. https://nautil.us/eels-dont-have-sex-until-the-last-year-of-their-life-237906/