‘As slippery as an eel’ is a commonly used platitude to anthropomorphize an eel’s snake-like demeanor of behavior upon a human being we dislike and do not respect. Our own unpleasant experience may have become ingrained as a youth by trying to get an eel off a hook we didn’t want to catch while fishing, or trying to bait a hook with one to land a striped bass. However, the eel today has outlived the dogma of judging a book by its cover with environmentalists who value it as remarkably adapted to be rated as a vital link to the pecking order of the aquatic food chain in oceans all around the world.
Subsequently, it is also highly rated as a gastronomical gift from those waters in Europe, Scandinavia, Asia, and the Orient, except for the United States, perhaps because of our distasteful comparison to a snake’s twisting and contrary demeanor when trying to protect itself.
In New England in their coastal migration, the eel is much like the anadramous alewife; however, it is reversed, or contradramous, meaning that the eel moves in the opposite direction, coming out of fresh water into salt some seven years from being spawned to develop into so-called silver eels for this transition.
If climate change in all this time has somehow dried up the channels of passage for their exodus, the oily covering over their bodies permits them to travel overland, providing it is paved with either wet grass or mud.
Then their remarkable journey takes them a thousand miles or more all the way to the Sargasso Sea, some thousands of miles between the West Indies and the Azores to spend the winter. The eel during this change in habitat undergoes physical adaptation into maturity, including changing sex several times.
The gastronomical history in New England, much like the alewife, dates back to starving Mayflower survivors still alive after the first winter in a barren wilderness when the Wampanoags took them to nearby Eel Pond to tread in the mud and catch with their hands the fat, sweet eels. They were destined from then on to become a dietary staple like the bean and the cod in colonial cookbooks with recipes of grilled, fried, boiled, smoked, stewed, and sautéed. That is, until the nineteenth century, with an annual harvest of about 400,000 pounds that now, a hundred years later, has dwindled down to today’s consumption of practically nothing, except in upscale fusion and sushi dishes or for ethnic heritage holiday celebrations.
The truly remarkable presence of the eel in our waters, like many other species, might be said to be a good barometer of the health of their ecosystem. Even as bottom dwelling creatures, they have probably the most acute sense of smell of any other living creature, as well as an adjustable adaptation to light and shadow, making them particularly sensitive to pollution or chemicals dumped by shoreline industry.
The current movement to tear down dams that block their natural passage, as well as building fish ladders, also helps to ensure that this mislabeled and misunderstood gift to humanity out of the sea will be around for future generations to fully understand and subsequently appreciate.
By George B. Emmons