Radiolab - Silky Love

Episode Date: September 27, 2019

We eat eels in sushi, stews, and pasta. Eels eat anything. Also they can survive outside of water for hours and live for up to 80 years. But this slippery snake of the sea harbors an even deeper mystery, one that has tormented the minds of Aristotle and Sigmund Freud and apparently the entire country of Italy: Where do they come from? We travel from the estuaries of New York to the darkest part of the ocean in search of the limits of human knowledge. This episode was produced by Matt Kielty and Becca Bressler.  Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.  Further reading: Lucy Cooke's book The Truth about Animals! Chris Bowser's Eel Research Project

Oh, my God, Matt. Oh, hold on. Money. Let me do money. Oh, okay. Oh, my God. I found it. Okay, here's the tweet.

Okay. Ficking. Whoa. Literally, I'm just reading it. How it's written. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Figure this donation thing out like other podcasts. Stop doing a PBS Pledge drive every time. And this is great. And maybe more people would give some jingle. So clearly. that's a tweet about the fact, oh, we should really quickly say, Matt Kilty.

Becca Brasler. We produced the episode that you're about to hear. And that tweet that you found after seven minutes for you to find a tweet about the fact that occasionally, not that often, I would say, not that often, we do a thing at the top of an episode where we ask if you would be so kind

to become a sustaining member, give money to the show on a regular basis because we put a lot of, a lot of time and energy and labor into making these things. And having people who give money on a regular basis, like, it supports the work that we do and allows us to do the work that we do that we love doing. We like, we know it's not the most fun thing to hear at the top of an episode. Honestly, it feels a little awkward having to ask. But it's kind of like it's an essential thing. It's totally essential. And we don't really have a different way to really do this. And there's

been this whole thing going on in September podcast appreciation month. And so we are just Simply, politely, sane. Consider becoming a sustaining member of the show. Yeah, and it could be, I don't know, what are the values? Like $5, $10, maybe if you're, like, feeling super generous, like maybe 20 or 30. Like whatever feels appropriate to you. Yeah, whatever feels good. Okay.

What else do we have to say? Thank you. Well, do you want me to have to say how to do it? Oh. Okay. You have the favor. I got it right here. Okay. So, first way that you can donate is you can go to radio lab.org slash donate. Uh-huh. Or you can text Radio Lab to 70101.

Radio Lab to 701. Yeah. Cool. That's it. Thank you. Enjoy the episode. Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. NY.

See? See? Yeah. All right, Bobby. Would you like to do it? Yeah, go ahead and start me, and I'll just go, I'll just take it through. Okay, three, two, one. Hey, I'm Chad I boom-rah.

I'm Robert Krollwitch. This is Radio Lab. And today I brought us a little, a little story. Hello. Lucy. That is... Robert. Oh, great.

Okay. A sort of slippery mystery. Slippery mystery. Okay. And the mystery comes from this woman, Lucy Cook. I'm the author of The Truth About Animals. And it's a riprole. It's filled with strange stories. Yes, it's really like we're like feasting on this book. Okay. So Lucy, yes. So Lucy wrote a book

and the book is actually a collection of animal profiles which come from her journalism. And I just, I love it. I love it a lot. And so I called her up and we just started talking about frogs. All sorts of animals. Bats. Sloths. The island of dwarf stone sloths in Panama. I have no idea what that means. Talked about birds. Birds. Birds are like turtles? No, no, no, no. We talked about...

If you're a female panda, bears. What you're really looking for in a male panda is one that can squirt his pee quite high up a tree. But what I really wanted to talk to Lucy about? Well, I'm going to stop right there and switch quickly to eels. Was eels. Because we only have 33 minutes left. And I don't want to...

Oh my God, and the eels are so good. And the eels are so good. So maybe... Because as you will soon learn, the story of the eel is really, and this is strange to think about, the limits of human knowledge. Yeah. Are you ready to rock and roll? You could just start with, like, tell me when you first, you know, first encountered this creature. Oh, I was a very geeky, only child. And what I love to do more than anything else in the world was my father sunk an old Victorian bath into the garden.

And that became my narnia. And I sort of disappear into this watery. kingdom and, you know, was obsessed with creating the perfect pond ecosystem out of this rather sterile tub for human ablution. It became my, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was everything to me. So every Sunday I'd nag my dad. Can we go to the ditches of Romney Marsh, please, Dad? And he'd sort of take me off and we go, he made me a net to catch things with out of a pair of old neck curtains. I'd sort of trawl through the ditches of Romney Marsh and catch all these wonderful

creatures, you know, pond skaters and nukes and frogs. And I'd bring them back to my tub. But eels became my holy grail. Because the thing about eels, I don't know, Robert, have you ever tried to catch one? No, I would never even think to try to catch them because they're oaky and slimy. And they remind me of snakes. Yeah, no, I wanted to because I wanted to have all animals. much like Noah.

I wanted all animals to be represented in my pond. Yeah, I had a list. And the eel, it was impossible. I caught them, but then trying to grab them with my own bare hands was always a complete disaster because they are, as you say, extremely slippery. They would just slither out of my hands and then shoot off in the grass, more like a snake than a fish out of water. But had I managed to get eels to join my happy pond party,

I would have been a little bit horrified because I now know they would have eaten all the other guests because they are voracious predators and they will eat any other creature that they can get their mouths around, including each other. Which Lucy explained was proven rather graphically in a famous 1930s experiment in France. Yeah, so basically in the 1930s there are a couple of researchers in Paris who placed a thousand elvers, which are young eels, they're about three inches long, in a tank of water. And they fed them every day. But even so, after a year, of the 1,000 elvers, there are only 71 left.

Because they all got sick and died or what? No, they ate each other. And so the 71 survivors a year later were three times as long as they were before. And then three months later, after what a local journalist reported as, daily scenes of cannibalism, there was one champion that was left, and it was a female, woohoo, measuring a foot in length. And she lived four more years on her own and could have lived a lot longer if the Nazis hadn't invaded Paris and inadvertently cut off her supply of worms. And she died. So. Those Nazis have got a lot to answer for. The eel story's got it all.

It does. It has everything. It's got it all. It's even got nuts. It's got Freud. It's got Nazis. It's got an international gonad championship. It's got everything. Wait, international gonads championship. Yes, yes. Because there has been, and there still is, a very simple question we've been asking about eels, and that is, where do they come from?

That's a question? Yes. People have been fishing them and eating them and hunting them and studying them, as you're about to find out, forever and ever and ever. For such an important animal, it's remarkable. It has kept the secret. of its origins from every human being. How can that be the true?

How can that be true? It's not for lack of trying. It's taken a very, very, very long time to try and figure out the mysteries of the eel. And Lucy says this question, where do eels come from? That is something that has tormented men of science since Aristotle. So he thought that eels were spontaneously generated by the action of water on mud and that The wormcasts that we see in sand were actually embryonic eels boiling out of the earth. Wait a second.

So water would slap, slap, slap, slap, slap against seashore rocks or sand or something. And then poit up would pop an eel? Yeah, exactly. That was Aristotle's solution. It wasn't his finest hour. And then the great Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, he thought that eels rubbed themselves against rocks and the scrapings came to life. You mean like dandruff? Like your eel dandruff?

If I go rub, rub, rub, rub, and point, I got a baby? Exactly, yeah. The ideas where they came from were utterly fanciful. You know, there was one Reverend Bishop who claimed in the Middle Ages that he'd seen eels being born out of the thatching of his roof. There were others that thought that they came from dewdrops, but only at certain times of year. What about when you get a microscope, like these are the superstars of science? So Van Levenhoek, he looked at them, right?

So he could have seen it. Yeah. So he thought that they gave them. birth to live young, like mammals do, because he sort of got his microscope out and he looked inside an eel and he thought he saw little baby eels swimming around inside a bigger eel, but actually what he'd seen were parasitic worms inside a swim bladder. So he was wrong. What about Carl Linnaeus, as long as we're dealing with the great Linnaeus who categorized all life, did he have an eel idea? Yep, he did. He thought that they gave birth to live young.

But the unfortunate thing was that he was actually looking at the wrong creature. It wasn't an eel. It was a very similar looking fish called an eel pout, which is a completely unrelated type of fish. So he was very wide of the mark. So let me get rid of the clutter of all of these non-Italians. Because in your story, it turns out that Italians are the ones for, I guess because they have eels in their rivers. They just, we've got to figure this out. I noticed that Leonardo in the Last Supper are the disciples eating eel for their Passover Seder?

Is that what's going on there? I believe so. I think there are eels on the table in the painting of the Last Supper. Okay. So, I mean, the Italians who are very good with food took a great interest in the riddle of the origins of the eel. And at a time in the 18th century, while Italy at that time was a load of warring states, there was no sort of sense of national identity. And there was a sort of small band of Italian scientists who decided that somehow that they would, they would forge an identity for their nation, not through revolution, but by finding the gonads of the eel.

It's a novel approach to politics. Did they succeed in Italianizing the gonad? Did they find them in Italian eels? Oh, they made a lot of attempts, basically. So it started in 1707 when a local surgeon found an unusually plumped. Eel, amongst the many thousands that were caught every day on the Poe River Delta. And he sliced it open and he saw what he thought was an ovary and eggs. And he sent this pregnant fish to his friend, the esteemed naturalist Valisnery,

who hastily proclaimed the centuries-long search for the evils, the evils, the eel's private parts was finally over. And unfortunately, he was wrong. but this then sort of ignited this interest amongst the Italian scientific establishment who decided it was a matter of extreme importance to find the true ovaries of the eel and they came up with this plan. They thought, I know what we're going to do. All we have to do is put out there a reward. Like if you find the gonads of an eel, you'll get a thousand do cats.

Exactly. So what happened was they got an eel stuffed with eggs, But unfortunately, the wily fisherman had filled his eel with the eggs from another fish. Oh, he cheated. He put it in a... Yeah, he cheated. So there was a bit of a blow for the Italians gondad hunt. And it went on pause for about 50 years.

And then in 1777, a fresh, fat, slimy suspect flopped up on the shores of Camacho. And it was examined by the great anatomist Carlo Mondini, who was a professor at the nearby University of Bologna, and he realized that the frilled ribbons inside the eel's abdomen weren't fringes of fatty tissue, which is what they previously thought, but they were the female eel's evasive ovaries. So bingo, ovaries found. Wait, frilled, fringe, what exactly did the ovaries look like? So, if you think of a, if you think of seaweed, when you open up a female eel, there is a little place in the middle of her tummy that looks like little wispy bits of flesh with little dots on the end.

Oh, they look like seaweed? Yeah. Nasty ovaries? Yeah. Turns out that those are their ovaries. Had they missed that? I don't know what. You know, I think they don't look like anything like mammalian ovaries.

They don't look like other fish ovaries. So they just, they were hiding in plain sight. And so then the male ovaries, do you have any sense of what those? The male testes are called. Tessies, sorry, yeah, male testesies. Testicles still missing, though. And what's amazing about the eel story, which is just absolutely extraordinary, is we now have another character who turns up.

The mission to complete the eel's genital jigsaw, you might say, fell to an unlikely character, Sigmund Freud. He's an eel hunter? Well, he was a student at the time at the University of Vienna, and it was his first ever academic job was he spent a summer trying to track down the testicles of the eel. He was investigating the claim of a Polish professor who had claimed that he had discovered the testicles of the eel,

but he hadn't saved them or he hadn't used a microscope, or for some reason there was no proof. So Freud was given the task of proving this claim. So for weeks, every day, from 8 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon in a hot, smelly laboratory, he sliced open long fallacentric fish in search of their testicles. Freud was completely consumed by it and failed.

He couldn't substantiate this Polish professor's claims and he moved on to look for the seat of desire in another animal, namely the human. So Lucy says, now jump ahead about 30 years to around the 1890s. A maleal finally exposed itself. And it was to this chap Giovanni Grassy. An Italian biologist who one day found an eel swimming off the coast of Italy.

Scooped it up, brought it back to his lab, cut it open and saw finally and with certainty. This is a little cloudy, cloudy, how he knew this, but he said, yep, these are the right thing. This is the testes and those are the sperm. Nothing short of miraculous. So did he get a big, like a prize of reward? Well, I like to think that there was an enormous great big cup shaped like a pair of testicles. Okay, let's just keep that thought in our heads and move on. Yeah, exactly.

But okay, so testes located, ovaries located. Right. Two great mysteries of nature. But there's another one. There's another even bigger one. Where do they go to do this thing? Where the testes and the eggs go, whi-wit, and make a baby. What do you mean where, like, in the water?

In the water, yes. But we're on earth. Huh. On earth, Chad. That turns out to be... Wow. There's... Oh, whoa.

Come on. In even deeper mystery. That's after the break. Hi, this is Megan, and I'm calling from Cloudy, Ithaca, New York. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www. W. sown.org.

Radio Lab. Okay, so Robert, you left us with the Eel Mysteries 1 and 2 solved. Testis. Located. Ovaries located. Right. Now you want to know how they have sex and where they have sex. I don't.

It's funny. I mean, now that you ask the question, I do want to know the answer, but I wasn't. Well, this has proven to be, you had a very hard question. And it was only a while ago that we found a clue. Grassy was on a bit of a role. So he'd found the testicles of the eel. And the clue was found by our Italian skull, Gracie. He does something incredibly ingenious because as early as the 1850s,

there were these tiny weeny, transparent fish, the shape and thickness of a willow leaf with bulbous black eyes and these snaggely gruesome buck teeth had been documented washing up in huge numbers on the shores of Italy. And these sort of minuscule monsters were just sort of dismissed as just to, another one of the many, many millions of nondescript marine creatures that inhabit the sea. But grassy, he thought to himself, I think that those are actually, they're not an adult fish. They're a larvae of a fish.

So they're a baby. I just don't know what they're about to grow up and to become. Yeah. And what he did that was so incredibly clever was that he counted their vertebrae. And it averaged at about 115. and then he looked for a match in an adult species of fish, and he found it in the European freshwater eel. It's just an amazing piece of biological detective work, I think. And it revealed that baby eels were living along the coastlines and then washing into the mouths of rivers all over the world,

Italy and Spain and Japan and... And where are we right now? The great state of New York. We are on the Fall Kill Creek in Poughkeepsie, New York. York where this creek enters the Hudson River. We have eels right around here in New York City. We do. We do. In Poughkeepsie. About 75 miles north of New York City. So our producer, Becca Bressler and I went up to Poughkeepsie to meet this man, Chris Bowser. I am the Hudson River estuary educator for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. And Chris explained to us when these tiny little baby

eels, like little pieces of transparent linguine, arrive in the Hudson River. They're only about two inches long. And they arrive here by the hundreds of thousands. And then they quickly, when they get here... They start transforming. Going through these physiological changes that makes puberty look like a kid's birthday party what these eels go through. Basically, these little eels settle down at the bottom of the river...

And blend in with the river bottoms. And grow... and grow... and grow... ...and grow and grow and grow and grow and grow and grow and grow and grow... There's only one way to see how big the eels in there are, and that's to go in there and see them. We want to catch... you some adult eels. Happy to do it.

Or... Not exactly happy to do it. I'm just... If you'd rather just get the eels, our team can go ahead and get them right now. No, no, no. I'm not going to wuss out on this.

I'm going to do this. Keep going then. Just keep going. But let me ask you. Like, the first time you actually touched one with your own hand, tell me what it felt like. Silky love.

People think of eels as being slimy? No, they're satiny, silky. They just feel like these beautiful, muscular, well-adapted miracles of evolution. You cannot touch an eel or hold an eel in your hand without feeling some weird love and wisdom coming to path. Have any brothers and sisters?

I do. They think I'm strange. Okay, so how am I going to catch anything with these rubber gloves? Ah, here comes Aidan to show you how. Chris and a few of his colleagues and Becca and I, we put on these canvas overalls, rubber boots, rubber gloves. This is for you. And we were given nets. Oh.

This is what we're going to be using to catch the eels. Okay. Scoop them with that net. Okay. And one of these researchers, she was netless. Instead, she had this long metal rod that connected to a backpack. When I'm going to turn the backpack on, whenever the backpack is on, it's putting electricity in the water. Basically, electrical current comes out of the backpack, into the metal rod, into the water.

To gently stun and coax these eels out of their hiding places. And once that happens, that's my cue. to grab one. All right, so is everybody ready? Ready, yes. All right. Sarah Mount, you're in charge. Sarah Mount's given directions now.

And so we walked out deeper into the creek. Okay, we're now mid creek. And eventually, we stopped, and Sarah, the researcher with the backpack. All right, backpack on. sent some electricity into the water and... There's an eel. There's one right there. Yeah, there's all.

One after another, these long, shiny creatures slithering through the water. Over there. Two wheels in here. Some of them are over three feet long. This is the... So... Oh, it's another one. I tried to net one.

Oh, that wasn't a small one. Whoa, almost they hit it. There's one. There's one. Over there. Going under the log. Wait, before you do that, everybody look up here and smile. Just because it's a great picture. Okay.

Go get them. Everybody ready? Ready. Back back on. There's an eel. But I just kept missing and missing... But I didn't catch any. ...and missing until finally.

Come on, come on. Whoa. In my net, a two-foot-long, shiny eel. If you want to take your glove off and touch it with your bare hand, you're welcome to. Yeah, too. You can feel that silky, smooth... Silky love coming my way. If I can get off my rubbery glove for the silky love.

Okay, Mr. Eel. Oh, yeah, it is kind of, it is kind of silky. Yeah. Oh, it isn't so bad at all. Yeah. What do you think, little fella? Do you feel in danger? No.

I'm going to call her Florence. Florence the Eel. Hey, here's your tail. I should say that eels can survive out of water, even crawl through the grass for hours. But eventually I did let Florence go back into the water, only to learn from Chris and his team that Florence wasn't actually a Florence, that Florence, in fact, wasn't either a male or a female,

because this particular eel didn't have ovaries or testes. And in fact, most of the eels that we saw on that day in the river didn't have ovaries or testes and were all sexless. Because this is the thing that happens the world over. It's that when eels are in rivers, they hang out, they grow, they get bigger, and then they are waiting essentially for this moment that comes almost at the midnight hour of their lives. It's like the ringing of a bell. When just as they're about to get their long-awaited ovaries and testes, they come up from the bottom of the riverbed, and then they make their way down the river and back out into the sea, and then they just, just...

disappear. You can't find them. I mean they just disappear. They can't follow them? They cannot be followed. Oh, is that why it was so hard for them to find the sex parts? Because maybe the ones they were cutting. Well, they had to find an older one, yeah. We didn't have them yet. Yeah. So they're not. Oh, that explains a lot of it. So they're like the opposite of salmon. Salmon start in the rivers and go down to the sea, spend a long time in the ocean and come back up the rivers. This is the eels are the unsammon. Oh, interesting. They start in the rivers. And they start in the rivers.

ocean somewhere, they go up to the rivers, they get big and mature, then they head back to the ocean somewhere. The question is where? Oh, nobody knows. I mean, this is weird. Do they all go to the same place? Well, you'll find out. Okay, all right.

Well, shall I try and tell the story of Johannes Schmidt very quickly then? So back to those early days of scientific eel hunting in the late 1800s, nobody had seen an adult eel out in the sea, strange as that may be. But then there's this guy Oceanographer, Johannes Schmidt. Who thought, well, wait a second. The eels we know go out somewhere into the ocean die and have babies. We see those babies showing up at the tops of rivers all over the world.

So let's track the babies backwards, he thought, starting with the biggest ones and look for smaller babies and smaller babies still. And the smallest, smallest babies will probably be right at the nest where the parents die and those babies are born. It's worth noting that Johannes Schmidt was described as being, and I quote, pathologically ambitious. Because remember what Schmidt's looking for are these tiny, tiny little eels.

The shape and thickness of a willow leaf. Like a three-inch long, translucent piece of wiggly flesh, so small. And we're talking about the Atlantic Ocean. So like, how are you going to pull this off? Well, he had rather fortuitously, he just married the heiress to the Kalsberg Brewery. And they were probably the best lager company in the world for an aspiring oceanographer to hitch his wagon to because they were known to fund ocean exploration.

So he'd married the heiress. And then he was then, because he had all these funds, he was able to spend after she'd married him. He then disappeared to sea for 20 years. 20 years. Combing the world's oceans. From Cairo and Alexandria all the way to Virginia. with progressively finer nets. Looking for smaller and smaller and then smaller baby eels.

His breakthrough came in 1921 when he, yeah, he found one that was a quarter of an inch long, which he presumed could be no more than a day or two old. And Schmidt found this eel. Slap bang in the middle of the Bermuda triangle. In the Sargasso Sea. First of all, it's so far away. from Italy and Spain and Europe, it's kind of near the Carolinas off North America,

and it's a very strange place. It's unusually salty. It's filled with an underwater forest of sargassum seaweed and very, very, very deep. I think in some places it's four miles deep. Oh. It is the only sea, the only thing we call a sea that doesn't have land around it.

It's this zone of very quiet water surrounded by roaring currents going in a big circle around it. And the idea is this is the place where all eels come to have their babies? No, not all eels, because there's eels all over the world. But for the Atlantic Yield, the Sargasso's is the place. At least that's the theory. Because since Schmidt's big discovery in 1921, we have been trying to confirm it.

So, for instance, a few years ago, scientists in Europe tagged 400 eels to see where they would go. They went into the Mediterranean, but most of them died. and very few got out into the Atlantic, and, you know, few of them went kind of wandering toward Africa. Then a year ago, roughly, there was another story about a single tagged eel. Can you tell me the story of that eel? I sure can. It was an eel that started up in the St. Lawrence River in Canada, who would eventually become a female eel. She heads south, sniffs around.

According to the tag, she then heads due east. Heads first towards Scotland, then reverses away back to Maine. starts up quick, beeline south. I don't mean south-ish. I mean south. South like she is following one of the magnetic longitudes of the planet.

She heads down and somewhere at the edge of the Sargasso, see? The tag comes off. We don't know if it falls off. We don't know if it was eaten. We don't know what happens. All we know is that's the end of the road of the

tag, but the fate of that female eel, we don't know. Exactly. And we don't know because even today, I mean, in fact, I got an email yesterday from perhaps the world's leading eel scientists. And he explained to me that sadly, after many, many, many years, much effort and millions of dollars spent, still no one had managed to actually track an eel all the way from the rivers of Europe to the Sargassi. But they tried, right? They did, exactly.

They sunk swollen eel tempteresses into the sargassau, hoping that they would attract males and they could catch them in flagranti and then finally prove that definitely that was observed eels mating. But still, it's never been seen. It's never been witnessed. Maybe the guys aren't there. Maybe they've got the wrong place. Or maybe the guys are shy. Or maybe the guys know a science experiment when they see one and are just not going to tell. I don't know which of those three.

Or they are actually breeding on the moon and falling out of the sky, raining on the Sargasso. We can't rule that out. We don't know where exactly. We don't know how exactly. But somewhere in the Sargasso Sea, there's the miracle of a fertilized eel egg. Miracle because no one has ever seen it? Correct. Ever.

In the wild. There is a secret sauce with eels that we. have not solved. Forget the Coca-Cola recipe. Eel sex is the real mystery of our generation. And we think we know roughly where in the Sargasso C it happens, but that's a think, not a no. We have never witnessed in the wild eel egg fertilization. Well, I know you're not an eel. So let me ask you, like, have you imagined where all the, let's assume, for the sake of argument, that there is. is a place that Atlantic Eels go to, and it is a place where they have sex, and it's a place where

they have babies, and it's a place where they die. In your imagination, what does that place look like, speaking as a human? In my imagination, and make sure that line makes it in, in my imagination, and again, this is without any proof, but in my imagination, I like to think of some deeper waters of the Sargasso Sea, somewhere between Bermuda and Puerto Rico. It's a quiet place, it's a dark place, it's beyond the reach of all but the barest of wavelengths of light up top. And I think that with these eels, you know, I've often wondered, do they pair off discreetly? Is there sort of a massive orgy of eels that happen? And I like to think of eels as once they get there, there's got to be some sort of primitive, ichthyological celebration

that feeling of my gosh, I have finally accomplished a 30-year, 3,000-mile journey. All of us have. I'm going to go back to what we were talking about, how much I love the mystery. I don't like to overthink it. Oh, you don't want to even think about that. I don't want to overthink it because, again, I almost respect and love the mystery so much that I see, like in the eel movie, right? fade to black. Cue the music,

the fireside lighting, you know, slow dissolve, fade to black. Tada. This piece was produced by Becca Bressler and Matt Kilty. Special thanks to the men and women of the Hudson River Estuary Program

who helped us with this project and brought their equipment and their bodies and their strange clothing down to the creek and to Clay Hiles. of the Hudson River Foundation who set us up with these folks and to Kim Airstrup. And to all the Ails that are on the cusp

of that great journey into the unknown who still won't tell us what they know. Deepwater nursery. Yeah. Thank you, Eels. Of mystery. Keep doing it, Eels. Keep doing it. And they're doing it, by the way, right around now. So it's in hurricane season.

So for a variety of reasons, these animals are just not telling. Okay. We're going to say goodbye now. Oh, okay. I'm Chad Avin Ron. I'm Robert Krollwich. Thanks for listening.

To play the message, press 2. Start of message. Hello, hello. This is Lucy Cook, author of The Truth About Animal and expert on Eels, giving you your credit. Radio Lab was created by Chad Avamrod and is produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keith is our director of sound design. Susie Lexenberg is our executive producer. Our staff includes Simon Abler, Betta Bressler, Rachel Cusick, David Gebel, Bessel Hapte, Tracy Hunt, Nora Keller, Matt Kielsey, Robert Crawlwoods, Annie McEwan, Lassif Nasta, Sarah Kari, Ariane Wack, Pat Waters and Molly Webster.

With help from Shima O'Nally, W. Harry Fortuna, Sarah Sandbach, Melissa O'Donnell, Neil Danesha, Marion Rayneau, and Paloma Moreno Jimenez. Our fact-checker is Michelle Harris. Thank you very much. Goodbye.