Slippery Beast - A True Crime Natural History, with Eels

Ellen Ruppel Shell-s Slippery Beast is a fascinating account of a deeply mysterious creature-the eel-a thrilling saga of true crime, natural history, travel, and big business. What is it about eels? Depending on who you ask, they are a pest, a fascination, a threat, a pot of gold. What they are not is predictable. Eels emerged some 200 million years ago, weathered mass extinctions and continental shifts, and were once among the world-s most abundant freshwater fish. But since the 1970s, their numbers have plummeted. Because eels-as unagi-are another thing: delicious. In Slippery Beast, journalist Ellen Ruppel Shell travels in the world of -eel people,- pursuing a burgeoning fascination with this mysterious and highly coveted creature. Despite centuries of study by celebrated thinkers from Aristotle to Leeuwenhoek to a young Sigmund Freud, much about eels remains unknown, including exactly how eels beget other eels. Eels cannot be bred reliably in captivity, and as a result, infant eels