From the Entrails of the Earth

The secret life of eels

From my classroom you could see the river or at least the willows that hung down over it. It was a branch of the Heathcote, and although it was only about three metres wide and half a metre deep it was full of eels. They were vicious creatures with teeth like needles. If you saw a duckling with a foot missing or a chunk out of its beak it was because an eel had slithered out from the mud to attack it. We gathered on those river banks at night, keen to kill eels. Our parents encouraged this as a wholesome alternative to watching TV. We swarmed about with our torches, nylon lines wrapped around pieces of wood, and meat for bait. One time, we bought an ice cream container part full of chicken blood.

The original sex tourists, New Zealand’s eels head to the islands to breed. They feel the pull of these warmer waters when in their mid-thirties and they take on a ‘breeding livery.’ This is the opposite of middle age spread. They become slender, sleek, bullet shaped. Their skin darkens and their eyes enlarge, almost doubling in size. This helps them see in the dark waters of the deep areas of ocean they need to travel through. In autumn, they move downstream in preparation and when the nights are darkest they head for the sea. There are accounts of teeming rivers alive with eels. Lake Ellesmere is estimated to have had migrations of up to 700 eels per hour. On these nights eels can be seen slithering over gravel sand bars and into the sea in their haste to mate.

They travel those long distances to their spawning grounds in the Pacific. Once they have breed and spawned they die while their eggs hatch into leaf shaped larva with mouths of sabre teeth. The larva then travel back to New Zealand on the ocean currents and during their 15 month trip they transform, becoming longer, the length of birthday cake candles, slender and completely transparent – glass eels. Like this they arrive at our river mouths one by one. After entering the estuaries they change again, becoming grey brown in colour. They spend a period hidden in the estuaries before migrating up stream to populate the country’s river system.

Later I would graduate to an eel spear. I bought the spear head from a hardware shop and fitted it to a broom handle. It was an evil looking thing, trident shaped with sharp barbed points, all painted in black enamel. One night, my friend stood on one of the footbridges over the river and hauled an eel up on his line. There was a streetlight nearby and the mucus on the eel’s skin glistened. The eel curled and arched on the end of the line. ‘It’s going to fall off,’ my friend said. I ran down into the water and stabbed the eel with my spear. We carried it up to the river bank and cut off its head.

Aristotle was correct in identifying the worms in eels’ bellies as parasites. Many observers that followed would make the mistake of seeing those nematodes as proof that eels give birth to live young. The reality, Aristotle believed, was that eels originate in the ‘entrails of the earth.’ They generate from the mud itself.
We didn’t know where the eels came from. We didn’t know they travelled thousands of kilometres to start their life. If we had ever thought about it Aristotle’s conclusion would have made the most sense to us. It would suit us to think that all they needed to do was squirm out of the mud.