Slippery Beast: Ellen Ruppel Shell on Eels, Ecology, and the Global Wildlife Trade
In this episode transcript, we dive into the world of eels with Ellen Ruppel Shell, author of Slippery Beast: A True Crime Natural History with Eels.
Summary
In this episode of Writer's Voice, we dive into the world of eels with Ellen Ruppel Shell, author of Slippery Beast: A True Crime Natural History with Eels. From ancient mysteries and ecological importance to international crime syndicates and sustainable farming, Ruppel Shell unravels the fascinating and complex story of one of nature's most enigmatic creatures.
The conversation traces the mysterious lifecycle of eels, their pivotal role in ecosystems, and their entanglement in a global black market. Ruppel Shell also highlights efforts to sustainably farm eels and the cultural significance of these creatures to Native American communities.
From Aristotle to the international criminal trade in wildlife, this episode offers a riveting exploration of eels and their connection to humanity.
Key Quotes
“Eels are like the bottom block of a Jenga tower—remove them, and ecosystems collapse.”
“The illegal eel trade is the largest wildlife crime by dollar value, rivaling international drug cartels.”
“Nature assumed eels. They’ve been here for millions of years, shaping ecosystems in ways we’re only beginning to understand.”
Key Topics
The mysterious lifecycle of freshwater eels and their migration to the Sargasso Sea
Eels’ ecological importance as predators, prey, and ecosystem engineers
The global eel trade: poaching, organized crime, and unsustainable practices
The decline of eel populations and its environmental consequences
Efforts in sustainable eel farming and Native American conservation initiatives
The paradox of human desire driving both exploitation and conservation
Transcript
Francesca: Ellen Ruppel Shell, welcome to Writer's Voice.
Ellen Ruppel Shell: Oh, it's great to be here, Francesca.
Thanks for having me.
This was really a very engagingly written book, Slippery Beast.
As you say in the book, you are not an eel person.
So why did you decide to write a book about eels?
Well, my usual response to that question, which I get quite a lot, people who know me are particularly surprised that I did this, is that I did not find eels, eels found me.
And there's a story behind that if you'd like to hear a bit of it.
Okay.
Well, I live quite a bit of the year on the coast of Maine and anybody who has lived for any time or visited the wonderful state of Maine knows that the winters can be pretty tough and they're very tough on houses.
So after taking the beating for a couple of decades, my home needed help.
And I hired a guy by the name of Sam, I call him Sam in the book, it's not his real name, but he's a real person to help me out to fix the roof and to fix a bunch of other stuff.
Sam was kind of a reluctant handyman and he used to come into my kitchen early most days, and sometimes he'd bring a four pack of cider and he'd pop one open and he'd tell me the stories about himself, his family, and especially his grandson, who he had a special affection for.
And one day he told me he was working as a handyman to put together enough money to buy himself a boat so he could teach his grandson how to fish.
And I said, Sam, you know, you don't love home repair. We know that. Maybe you should mix business with pleasure and get a fishing license, a commercial fishing license to go with that boat.
And he said to me, well, I would do that. In fact, at one time I did do that, but not since the eels.
And I said, what do you mean the eels? Are you worried they're going to bite, Sam? What is this?
He said, oh, no, no, eels don't bite as far as I know. But I'm not talking about the eels big enough to bite.
Anyway, I'm talking about the baby eels. You know, the baby eels, ever since the price of those went through the roof, it's gotten dangerous down by the river.
And I said, what do you mean the price has gone through the roof? How much would people pay for a mess of eels?
And he said, oh, this year it's about $2,500 a pound. Ever since that price hit, people have been carrying guns, they've been cutting nets. It's gotten really dangerous.
I want no part of the eel business. So after hearing that story, first of all, I didn't believe it because Sam had lots of tall tales, but as it turns out on this one, he was right. It turned out to be true.
And I was working on another book at the time, something completely different, but I stored this away in the back of my mind and I couldn't get it out of my mind and when I was finished with the previous book, I took a look at the whole question of eels in Maine and it grew into a bigger and bigger story, the natural history of eels, the fact that people have been looking at eels since Aristotle and been fascinated by the mystery of eels and it just exploded into something I just had to write about.
And I'm so glad you did. I learned so much from this book and we'll get back to the trade in eels, but first, tell us more about the mystery of eels, where they are found, a couple of fun facts about them.
Well, first, yeah, you're right. When we talk about eel people, the first eel person I could come up with was Aristotle. Over 2000 years ago, he was fascinated by eels and like everyone, puzzled by eels because eels were everywhere.
The freshwater eels is what I talk about in the book. That's the eels most Americans are aware of, the American eel being our only one.
In Europe, it's the European eel and Aristotle was absolutely fascinated by this creature because it was everywhere. It was oftentimes about 50% of the biomass in a river or a lake. Just hugely prolific and yet, no one knew how they reproduced.
So Aristotle made the assumption, concluded that they were spontaneously generated, that they kind of just sprouted from the mud. And he actually used the eel as an example of spontaneous generation.
And again, we're talking about 2000 years ago, this continued, this theory continued from scientists, you know, through the millennia, hundreds of years, people assumed that eels spontaneously generated because there were so many of them, and yet no one had ever seen an eel egg, no one had ever seen them reproducing in the wild, and in fact, no one had ever seen a sexually mature eel in the ocean, in the open ocean.
So how the heck could there be so many eels? They had to be coming from somewhere.
And so again, this was the ideal, various versions of the spontaneous generation story. The mystery of the eel was considered one of the great mysteries in biology for hundreds and hundreds of years.
So in the book, I go through the various scientists and scholars, pseudoscientists who address this question and the various things they did to kind of solve the answers. All the false dead alleys they went down and came up with nothing, the various theories that they propose, each one more bizarre to explain this phenomena. But it really was incredible.
And these theories continued right up through the 1800s. So it's not that long ago that people subscribed to the spontaneous generation theory of eel reproduction. That is, that eels, you know, did not beget eels, but eels came from inanimate objects, inanimate things.
You know, it's funny, I remember when my son was 11 years old, and he was like in seventh grade, and he wrote an absolutely charming essay about Anguilla the eel, who was born in the Sargasso Sea. And it was the first time I'd ever even heard of this. But this seems to be, if not the breeding ground, at least the main breeding ground of eels, and the source of, or the origin of where they begin their epic migration. So tell us a little bit about the life cycle of the eel, and kind of the different stages they go through.
Well, your 11-year-old son was correct. Because Rachel Carson also wrote an essay on the eels, you know, famously. Also Rachel Carson was a huge fan of eels, and fascinated by eels, by the way. And she wrote, you know, beautifully of Anguilla the eel. So your son was quite prescient there, and definitely on the mark.
Yeah, so the eel breeding grounds, when it was finally concluded that they must be breeding in some way, there must be some sexual reproduction of the eel. Again, not really proven, but that was the assumption.
It started in the early 20th century, a guy named Johannes Schmidt, who actually married into the Carlsberg Beer Company, and therefore had enough money to take these epic sea expeditions to search for the breeding ground of the eel, of the European eel, and as it turned out, the American eel.
As part of this epic, his process was to follow ear larvae through the sea, to follow them as they got smaller and smaller, assuming that the smaller meant younger, and he would follow them back to where they reproduced originally. That was his theory, and he did that. Now, he didn't actually manage to nail the deal, but he claimed to have.
The assumption today is that most eels, if not all eels, and again, this is controversial, breed in the Sargasso Sea, south of Bermuda.
Now, the Sargasso Sea is a very strange place. It's the only sea in the world that is bounded by currents, not by land masses. It itself is a very mysterious place, and I went there, and I got to tell you, it is kind of a weird place.
It's beautifully blue and coated with this sargassum sort of seaweed, this substance, that makes it look bizarre, but also somewhat treacherous, because it was concerned that boats would get clogged in this Sargassum, including Columbus. He was concerned he was going to get clogged in it as well, so there's a great story around the Sargasso Sea.
But in any case, it is thought now that eels breed somewhere in the Sargasso Sea. We're not sure where.
This is both the European eel and the American eel, the so-called Atlantic eels. They breed there, and the resulting larvae then travel with the currents. They also propel themselves. It's recently been shown that they also propel.
For a while, people thought, for many years, people thought they just drifted with the currents, but it's more than that. They go up, in the case of the American eel, they go with the currents by Venezuela, through the Caribbean, and then up to the eastern seaboard of the United States, all the way to Greenland.
In the United States, there's only one large fishery for baby eels, and that is in the state of Maine, which is why the book is based in Maine. Not entirely, I went all over the world to report the book, but I centered it in Maine, because that is the only significant legal fishery for baby eels.
We don't want to get into the trade of eels quite yet, but the reason it's important, and that reason Sam was talking about baby eels, is because adult wild eels, found in lakes and rivers, are almost worthless.
Their flavor is not particularly good, generally speaking. Eels can spend as much as 40 years in a lake, for example, and they are bioaccumulators, which means they store toxins and other things in their fat.
They're quite fat. Eels have quite a bit of fat, and so the taste of them, the wild eel, is not desirable.
So 98% of eels consumed in the world, commercially consumed, are cultivated eels, grown up on farms, eel farms, kind of hard to imagine, eel farms. And those eel farms, for the American eel, are almost entirely in China.
So eels are harvested in Maine, along the Maine coast, elders, baby eels, and shipped to China, where they're grown up on these eel farms, there are about a thousand eel farms in China, and then they are slaughtered and processed, sometimes covered in sauce and frozen, and then shipped back to the United States.
So that's an incredible supply chain for eels. Not only is their lifecycle chain very, very convoluted, but their commercial chain is also quite convoluted. And that's how it works, and that's why baby eels are so valuable, while adult eels are not.
You said at one point, or they used to be, like 50% of the biomass of the waterways in which they were.
But as with so much else with the natural world, they are in decline. How much, how threatened are they?
Well, there are three major species of freshwater eels that I discuss in the book, and most listeners will be familiar with these three and not most other kinds of eels. So that is the Japanese eel, the European eel, and the American eel.
So the Japanese eel is quite endangered. It's down by as much as 95% from its peak. The European eel is down by about 90 to 95% of its peak, also endangered. The American eel is considered threatened in the United States. It's down by about 50%. Some waters, say like the St. Lawrence, are almost empty now of eels. That was a river that was full of eels, Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River. Now it's almost gone, the eel's almost gone there.
I talked to John Castleman, an eel scientist in Canada, who's been monitoring that eel population for decades, and he's quite concerned about the decline of eels in the St. Lawrence.
Other places still have them, but they're pockets of sufficient eels and in areas where there are not enough eels, where they've really suffered quite a loss.
So the United States doesn't really protect its eel populations, and European scientists are quite frustrated by this, especially because they've seen what has happened in Europe, and they warned me.
And as I said, I traveled the world for this book. When I was in Europe, scientists were quite concerned about America's, how to put it, laissez-faire attitude toward their eel populations, because they have declined by 50 percent.
And if we don't do something fairly soon, they will continue to decline, which is not the best thing for ecosystems in the U.S.
And so, Ellen Ruppel-Schell, in this book, Slippery Beast, you say that the eels are important to ecosystems. What role do they play?
So the eel is a very, very ancient creature. It's been around for a very long time, since way before the dinosaurs. So it's integral to many, many, many ecosystems.
As I say in the book, nature assumed eels. The eels have been around so long and in so many different environments that nature took eels for granted, that there would be eels. So it put other things in place, assuming that there would be eels.
When you remove eels, it's kind of like taking out the bottom block on a Jenga tower, right? The whole thing can collapse.
So eels are indicator species and healthy eels in a lake or a river, usually an indication that the river and the lake is in good shape. If you remove eels from a lake or river, there are changes. And it depends. It varies with the lake or river.
The example I use in the book is the Susquehanna River, which had four large dams, very large dams that prevented the migration of eels. And as eels declined in the Susquehanna, the number of freshwater mussels in that waterway also declined radically because eels are essential for the distribution of freshwater mussel larvae.
I know that sounds really complicated, but basically eels are like Ubers. They take freshwater larvae and they distribute them through the lake for the river. Without eels, it was harder for them to distribute.
So the number of freshwater mussels declined radically. And mussels are filter feeders. So they take pollutants and toxins out of the water, they filter them out. So without mussels, the river became quite murky and polluted.
So you can see it's kind of this chain of events that happens when you remove eels, other bad things happen.
The other thing is eels are both predators and prey. So many animals depend on eels as a food. And eels also are important scavengers, sometimes of creatures that we don't want in waterways. So invasive crab populations, for example. You take the eels out who eat these crabs, and crabs will take over invasive species.
So it's really messing with Mother Nature to remove eels from a waterway. You don't really know what's going to happen.
But again, in Europe where they've had these radical declines, they've seen some very unfortunate things happening, which is why the European scientific community is very much up in arms about eel declines.
And they have very strict regulations in place. The United States is a few steps behind there.
Yes, and you have a story about this trade in eels, this incredibly lucrative trade that is a major reason why they are threatened. You have a story about the eel godfather, where the term godfather is not exactly benign. So tell us about William Sheldon.
Right. He's a kingpin, I guess. I met William Sheldon, Bill Sheldon, a couple of months after he was released from the federal penitentiary. He is a Maine eel dealer and eel fisher.
When I met him, he was 73 years old, he's a grandfather, and known as an expert on the American eel.
And he is an expert. He has a degree in fisheries management. He was the inventor of a special eel trap. And he is an expert on the care and feeding and fishing of eels.
I'll call him Sheldon, okay, by his first name. Sorry, by his last name. William Sheldon decided that even though he was profiting tremendously by the eel industry, by his both dealing and fishing for eels, he wanted more. And so he was a kingpin in a massive poaching operation that occurred up and down the Eastern seaboard.
It involved about eight different states and about 110 individuals who were poaching eels, stealing elvers, baby eels, in places where it was not legal to fish for those eels, sometimes laundering them through the state of Maine where it is legal to fish for baby eels under a quota system.
Of course, they were not regarding the quota system at all. And as I said, it was about 110 individuals.
It was a four-year investigation by Fish and Wildlife and other federal agencies, federal and local agencies. And in April 2014, there was a bust, a major bust where all these fishers and dealers were arrested all at the same time, about 110 were arrested and 22 were brought to trial, including Mr. Sheldon.
And as I say, he was found guilty because of mitigating circumstances in his life. He was given only six months in the federal penitentiary and he's now back out dealing eels. He's got a thriving eel dealing business. He was the largest eel dealer in Maine, probably still is.
So folks know this, internationally, eel is the largest, by dollar, the largest wildlife crime on the planet.
It's hard to believe it. So I certainly thought it was maybe elephant tusks or tiger paws or something like that. But in fact, the number one wildlife crime in dollars is the illegal trade in elvers.
You write that the paradox is that eels are under threat because they're desirable, but their very desirability also curbs their risk of extinction. So tell us what is happening to combat this terrible criminal trade in eels and to protect their populations?
So Francesca, I'm really glad you brought that up because it's subtle, right? It's subtle. It's hard to get your head around this.
Animals that we don't care about at all are sometimes at higher risk of being endangered because we're not paying attention to them. So we do pay attention to what people call charismatic megafauna, right?
You know, polar bears, and whales, and tigers, and lions, and we pay attention to them because they're magnificent animals. There are other animals that we rely on for food, and so we pay attention to them, like salmon.
If we didn't desire eel, and eel has become increasingly desirable as a food around the world, we probably wouldn't pay that much attention to it. So scientists don't want to kill the eel industry. They don't want to stop people from eating eel entirely. They would like to see the responsible harvesting of eels, harvesting and processing of eels. And so they would like to see it regulated.
They don't like the wild, wild west aspect of the eel market that they see now, where tons and sometimes more than, you know, multiple, you know, 20, 30 tons of eel, of baby albers, are shipped to China and processed and therefore endanger the species.
So in the case of the European Union, they've outlawed the export of European eel out of the EU. So it's, again, that has made American eel more desirable because American eel, it's perfectly legal to ship it to China and to the eel farms in China. It is not legal to do that with the European eel. The European eel has got to stay in Europe.
And if it's harvested as an elver in Europe, it needs to be grown up on a European eel farm, which there are not that many of. There are many, many more Chinese eel farms. So it is the case that much of the European eel is still poached. It's very difficult to control it.
There are organized crime cartels involved with this because it is so profitable. Many of the people I spoke with compared it to the drug, international drug industry, drug cartels. Because really, we're talking $4 billion. That's the number that's thrown around when we talk about the illegal eel trade. Very, very, very lucrative.
What are some of the things, I mean, I'm sure there are listeners who would like to do something about this, if there is anything to do about it. I know in your book you write about a family farm for eels, you write about Native American culture that has been trying to reclaim its sovereign right to eels as a sacred tribal resource and would then protect the eel or do that in a sustainable manner. But is there anything that listeners can do to help raise awareness or to protect the American eel?
Well, I have to be careful because I don't want to advertise for an individual. However, I do write in the book of the first commercially viable American eel farm, which was started not far from my home in Maine.
And it is what they call, the person who runs it, her name is Sarah Rademacher, calls it a family farm.
It's not really what any of us would think of as a family farm. It is obviously water tanks in a large, very large building in a business park in Maine. And it is a environmentally sustainable facility for growing up Maine eels in the United States. So the whole process can remain in the United States and be under some kind of controls.
The eel that is brought there, the eels that are brought there are legally caught. So her product, it's called American Unagi, is very desirable and therefore it's expensive. So it's not available to everyone, but it's a step in the right direction.
I've heard recently that a Native American group, Passamaquoddy, it's a Native American tribe and one of the four Native American tribes in Maine, has recently gotten funding to start their own eel farm in a different part of Maine. So there's an effort to, again, localize eel production in the United States.
Those of course would be sources that would be sustainable, obviously would not be a bad thing to ask about the provenance of the eel that you're eating, if you can, but 99 times out of a hundred, it's likely to be, if it's American eel, it's likely to have been processed in China.
So again, that doesn't mean that it cannot be sustainably processed in China. It's just that we have very few controls over there, whether or not they use hormones, what's in the eel is always questionable.
So I, for one, have changed my eating habits personally. I'm a big fan of eel. I feel pretty confident, the times I've been lucky enough to be in Europe to eat eel there. In the United States, I'm a little bit more cautious about eating it, to be honest, since I've written the book.
Well, we've run out of time. There is so much more in this book. It really is, was a delightful book to read in spite of the fact that there's a lot of, you know, sadness that I feel at one more example of how humans are eating ourselves out of house and home. Ellen Ruppelschel, thank you so much for talking with us here about Slippery Beast, a True Crime Natural History with Eels.
Thank you. It was so much fun.