The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Slippery Beast: A True Crime Natural History, with Eels by Ellen Ruppel Shell

Episode Date: August 14, 2024

Slippery Beast: A True Crime Natural History, with Eels by Ellen Ruppel Shell https://amzn.to/4fHuIcn 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 are unbelievably valuable. A pound of the tiny, translucent, bug-eyed “elvers” caught in the cold fresh waters of Maine can command $3,000 or more on the black market. Illegal trade in eels is an international scandal measured in billions of dollars every year. In Maine, federal investigators have risked their lives to bust poaching rings, including the notorious half-decade-long “Operation Broken Glass.” Ruppel Shell follows the elusive eel from Maine to the Sargasso Sea and back, stalking riversides, fishing holes, laboratories, restaurants, courtrooms, and America’s first commercial eel “family farm,” which just might upend the international market and save a state. This is an enthralling, globe-spanning look at an animal that you may never come to love, but which will never fail to astonish you, a miraculous creature that tells more about us than we can ever know about it.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hey, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

There you go, ladies and gentlemen. The hour of the latest things that makes it official. Welcome to the big show We certainly appreciate you guys coming by As always for 16 years 2,000 episodes We've been bringing you All the smartest and brightest people

Do you know we were started 16 years ago this month Somewhere I think it's around the 19th or so We hit the 16 year mark Can you believe we've been podcasting For that long I'm tired already

Anyway guys We have an amazing author on the show As always we have the most amazing folks But refer your friends neighbors relatives go to goodreads.com forchesschrisfosslinkedin.com forchesschrisfosschrisfoss one of the tiktokity and all those crazy places on the internet we have the author of the hottest new book coming off the shelf on august 6 2024 it'sery Beast, a true crime national history with eels of all things. Ellen Ruppel-Shell is on the show with us today

where we're talking about her slippery new book. It's sliding into bookstores, wherever bookstores can be found. And hopefully it'll slide into your cart so that you'll order it online as it were just slide your credit card through there too your slippery credit card ellen spent years as a contributing editor and correspondent for the atlantic where she wrote on various issues of the day that intrigued mattered or simply caught her fancy her reporting essays and reviews have

also been featured in the smithsonian the the New York Times Magazine, Science Magazine, Audubon, Audubon? Audubon? I guess I need to read it more. The Guardian, which I do read, the Washington Post, or we like to call the WAPO, the LA Times, the Boston Globe, and other outlets. She's a professor emerita of science journalism at Boston U and a research focus on the intersection of science culture and society welcome the show ellen how are you i'm great thanks for having me chris

thanks for coming we really appreciate you sliding by this slippery show give us the dot comms where can people find you on the interwebs it's ellenshell.com there you go ellenshell.com so ellen give us a 30 000 overview of your new book slippery beast wow 30 000 foot overview given that eels tend to find themselves deep underwater that's that's quite a ways up i have to say that i got interested in this topic many years ago when i learned that eels in the state of maine where i own a home, were selling, baby eels were selling for $25,000 to $3,000 a pound. What? Yeah.

Yeah. You have to sell, get an eel farm. You got it. And this is the lobster state, right? Maine, the state of Maine. I'm learning this phenomenal fact, up to $3,000 a pound for baby eels. I mean, who the heck cares about a mess of baby eels? Turned out we did.

And as a consequence of that, after I learned that, I knew I had to write a book about them. Wow. Yeah. That's a lot of money for, I mean, I always thought they were kind of the throwaway food of the sea. Like, you know, they're just kind of snaky. And I think when we were kids we used to believe they would electrocute the crap out of you i don't know if they still do that or that was an overreaching sort of meme or something and no electric eels electric eels aren't really

eels okay lampreys aren't really eels there are 820 species of eels but my book is about the freshwater eel right and and the one in particular the american eel which we have between the east coast and the mississippi river we have this eel but the state of maine is the only significant place to the only significant elver fishery elvers are baby eels and those baby eels are what cost a bundle, not the grown-up eels. Nobody cares one bit about the grown-up eels. It's the baby eels they want. Yeah, that sounds like you when I was trying to get adopted when I was young. When I grew up, no one wanted me. No one still wants to adopt me. I don't know why. Wait, I could be an adult.

What's going on with these eels? Why are they so expensive? Are these being served in Michelin restaurants or something we don't know about? Or what's the deal? The baby eels aren't being served in Michelin restaurants. They're not the ones that are being fished off the coast of Maine. They're being shipped all the way to China where they're grown up to market size. They're slaughtered there and they're prepared there, processed, slathered with sauce, and they're shipped back to the United States to be sold in those sushi restaurants you talked about. So it's the craziest supply chain.

Not only is the life cycle of eel insane and crazy, but the supply chain for eels in the United States is nuts. Well, it sounds like they get a lot of travel time in on their flight card. You know, they get to fly to China and back. I mean, yeah, yeah. Some, I don't know. You don't get much opportunity to use those points they're having more fun than trout i don't know but so now you you build this as a true crime in natural history where's where's the crime part at as you can imagine when you're talking about something that's selling for two to three thousand

dollars a pound syndicates criminal syndicates organized criminals of all kinds cartels have all gotten involved in this business and in fact it is the number one in terms of money the number one wildlife crime in the world must be yeah yeah you think about tiger you know tiger paws or elephant tusks or that's what I thought, you know, were the big crimes. Four billion dollars a year in illegal elver trafficking. That's baby eels. Yeah. So a lot of crime in the United States.

I talk about Operation Broken Glass, which was a four year investigation of a poaching ring on the East Coast United States. It involved eight different states and one kingpin a grandfather in the state of maine who was kind of organizing the whole thing and a huge bust in 2014 they arrested 110 people a lot of money involved there guns were you know guns were pulled people were threatened there was a threatened. There was a helicopter chase. It was a big deal. Wow. Now, is it legal to trade in these eels?

Or how is the illegal trade going on? Okay, so if you're going to look at the state of Maine, so there are three kinds of commercially available eels, right? There's the Japanese eel, the European eel, the American eel. But let's talk about the American eel so there's only one legal elver fishery in in the United States as I mentioned that is the state of Maine that's it there's a small a tiny one in South Carolina but that doesn't really count so it is legal to fish for elvers for a few months each year in the state of Maine but you have to get a license.

And those licenses are impossible to get now. You can't imagine. You can't get them. They had a lottery this year. There were 14 licenses available, 4,500 people applied to get them because it's a jackpot. If you get that license, so there's a quota. And in Maine, they can fish only is less than 10,000 pounds a year. So once that quota has been met, you can't fish them anymore unless you're a poacher, okay? So then you can do what you want. Within reason. Right?

Not within reason. Within the reason of the law. So that's true around the world. So in Europe, European eel is banned outside of the European Union, but true around the world so in europe they're banned it's a european eel is banned outside of the european union but it is also smuggled so these smuggling rings are as i said all over the world and the caribbean especially there's eels coming out of haiti pretty messy business why don't they just make it like pot they just make it legal and then the crime part goes away you know that's south america somewhere with their drugs you know i i thought about that argument certainly when it comes to drugs but when it

comes to eels eels have declined by over 95 in europe and japan and they are threatened in the united states as well so we gotta do something about it or we're gonna lose this jackpot i gotta look at the my sushi menus harder because I've never seen eel on the sushi menu and I never would eat it. I don't know. It sounds awful. Sushi, okay. Eel is on many Japanese restaurant menus, but it's not really sushi because you have to cook it. It's not eaten raw. It was thought that it was poison to eat raw and it's got a toxin in it that actually is taken care of by our digestive system. Still, you wouldn't want to eat raw eel. Yeah.

I'm not going to eat it either way. You're a slimy little beast, as per the cover of your book. Tell us a little about you. You've written on a lot of books about a lot of different variations of things. I don't see any eels. There's the hungry gene, which is kind of what we're talking about, eating eel now. Tell us about your upbringing. What got you into journalism, got you into writing books, and into the road you've been down for your life? Oh, my goodness. I mean, we're talking ancient history, but I studied biology at university,

did some graduate work in that, but at the same time was really interested in the written work. So, English minor really got, you know, fascinated in the same time was really interested in the written work. So English minor really got, you know, fascinated in the idea of narrative nonfiction, which is writing novelistically about nonfiction topics, and ended up doing that. That was my, it's been my life's work. Been teaching it as well for many, many years at Boston University. And I'm interested in, I think you mentioned this in the introduction, the integration of economic science, social justice, and people. So this book is more about the eel people than it is about the eel itself. Okay, the people who get tangled up with eels and cannot get untangled.

And we're talking about people starting with Aristotle that long ago, all the way up to today. Okay. It's like a cult. It's like a cult. It's like an obsession. I mean, once a scientist gets started with eels, they can't get it out of their system. It is the funniest thing. And I get it because the eel is a remarkable, remarkable animal.

I think it looks just like a snakefish. That's how I think of it. It does look like a snake. And so most people, many, many people are put out by eels, including me. I mean, I thought they looked like snakes. I thought they were snakes. I knew nothing about eels when I took on this project. I'm not letting them in my bathtub, that's for sure.

I don't know what that means. But let's see. The eels are nature's Rorschach test. What we think about them reveals not much about them and a lot about us. Oh, really? Yeah. Maybe I need to see a therapist then, evidently, about my issues with the eels. Show me the eel where the eel hurt you.

You know, Freud messed with eels. You're talking about the phallic nature of eels. I hear what you're saying. Is that what he's saying? But no, no. Freud, his little project was not about the phallic nature of eels, but a lot of people think it was. Yeah, I think the eel is some people,

many people are terrified by eels in literature. Yeah, it's like a slippery snake, eh? Oh, yeah. I mean, you wouldn't believe how many films and and books involve this you know horror stories involve eels you know people being trapped in a uh you know a pool with eels and being eaten live bait the screeching eels and right screeching eels and princess bride you, all these in, you know, novel after novel, they are featured as really bad guys. Okay.

Marvel Comics has evil eels. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Eels need to get a better PR agent, basically. They do. They do. You wrote the book on them, so I think you've put yourself forward.

Let me just say, unlike some of the scientists I profile in the book, I'm not going to go swimming with eels. It did not fall in love with them, but I was absolutely fascinated by them. Have you become an eel people? I will never be an eel person.

My relationship with nature is best put as precarious. I'm scared of bugs. I'm scared. Okay, I'm scared of bugs. I'm scared of spiders. I'm scared of snakes. And it took me a while to learn that eels were not a threat to me. I'm not an eel person. However, I have to say what I found incredible about this creature is how their history, how their understanding of them kind of parallels the history of science.

Because scientists, as I said, since Aristotle, have been fascinated trying to figure out the answer to the big eel question. Okay, this is eel question. That's like this huge mystery in biology. And so many people have devoted their lives to trying to figure it out. Huh. What's the mystery? The mystery is there are two of them.

One, how do these things reproduce? So eels are so common that they, a hundred years ago, they constituted 50% of the biomass in many rivers, lakes around the world. They were everywhere. They're very, very popular food. They were everywhere. And yet no one had ever seen them do the deed. No one had ever seen an egg or seen actually a sexually mature eel in the open ocean.

No one had ever seen them. So the theory was stretching all the way back from aristotle was it was you know they generated spontaneously it was spontaneous generation which you know is a discredited theory but it was a very popular theory theory for hundreds and hundreds of years and the eel was what's a prime example of spontaneous generation like it just came out of the air or it came out of the mud. So the cells... I think someone wrote a book about that of some guy.

There was some spontaneous combustion that went on, some Mary or Jesus or something. I don't know. Oh, spontaneous combustion? That actually happens, the spontaneous generation? Yeah, it does happen.

Spontaneous generation combustion. It's all the same. Right. It doesn't happen. It's all science. Yeah. Actually, I do know how e all science. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I do know how eels reproduce. Brothels.

They go to a lot of brothels. That's why no one sees them because they're usually in a brothel when it happens. But you have seen them in the brothel. Is that what you're saying? I did, actually. I was just there running security. Oh, research purposes? Research purposes. All right. I hear you.

A friend told me. Yeah, we're a friend. I hear you. They're in their brothels giving people the slippery beast. I don't know what that means. Anyway, so do we get both questions or both? No, no. The other question is, okay, so if they do breed, which they do, by the way, they're not spontaneously generated, where does where does it happen where does it all happen because no one as i said and to this day by the way no one has spotted an eel in the open ocean okay oh nope nope or found an eel like nope and they're looking they've using all sorts of technology they're you know they can't see these things what they do know

now through after hundreds of years of research is that the eels spawn in the Sargasso Sea, which is south of Bermuda. And I went there to hang out with the scientists who were looking, you know, looking into this question. They're trying to track down precisely where they spawn. And then after they spawn, the Atlantic eels, which are the European and the American eels, the American eels swim up the east coast of the united states up to maine up to canada as well and they are larvae at that point right so they start off they mate as soon as they mate they die okay the materials die after immediately after they mate And then the larvae swim up over 1,000 miles up to Maine, in our case, in the case of my book, and then become a glass eel, what's called a glass eel, which is a transparent eel.

It looks, you know, really kind of bizarre. It's like a bloated toothpick, but it's transparent. Then as it crosses over the continental shelf and comes into the rivers it it turns into an elver which is pigmented and then it swims inland as far as the mississippi it swims sets up shop in some lake or pond or someplace like that and stays there for up to 50 years before turning around as a mature silver eel, swimming all the way back and going back to the Sargasso Sea. It no longer eats on that trip home.

It lives on its body fat and its own bones. It gets all the way back there, spawns, and dies. So that's the life cycle we think of the eel, but we're not sure. Okay, we're still not sure. And I hung out with a scientist. I called him the Ahab, Captain Ahab of the eel, who is still launching these expeditions trying to figure out, you know, unlock all these secrets of the eel.

But there are tons of scientists all over the world working on this problem. Wow. Yeah. Trying to figure out how eels breed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm still trying to figure out how stupid people breed.

Oh, wait. I think I know. Not that way. Not that way. Not that way. Booze and cocaine. So there you go. What else do we need to know?

What do you hope people come away with when they read your book oh it's all sorts of things i mean one of the things that i found as i said before was this amazing trajectory of eels through history and how all these scientists were just fascinated by them obsessed with them you know literally died trying to solve these problems answer these questions there's quite's quite a story in that. The other thing I like to think about in the book and what I learned was just how far people will go to answer questions. There's not a lot of money in solving these scientific questions, and yet people devote their lives to them because they're committed.

It's sort of a testament to human perseverance and curiosity, which is really something. Yeah. I mean, some people, some scientists are really into eels and now journalists. So there you go, telling their stories. It's crazy. And they live an interesting life. I mean, that's a lot of money for some fish. Yeah. What do I know? Yeah. But remember, those baby eels are tiny. They're about 2,500 of those to a pound.

So you have to think of those almost like tomato seeds. You know? Oh, wow. Because each one of those little elvers is going to grow up into a pound of eel. Wow. So that one pound will be 2,500 pounds of eel. That's why it's so valuable. There you go.

And he's going to just end up in soy sauce and that green stuff. I forget what it's called. Yeah, yeah. So there you go. This has been fun to have you on the show. This has been Eel Talk Podcast. You've been on. Do you know the rock group, the eels?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You should play that music on the way out. Yeah, there you go. Maybe you need to start your own eel podcast, talk about the book and have guests on to talk about eels and just be a whole sub-genre. Yeah, yeah. I think I'll leave you with a podcast, but thanks.

It's a good suggestion. You know, if I could make $2,500 a pound doing podcasts, maybe I would do it. There you go. I'll wait for book two, Slippery Beast, The One Who Got Away or something. I don't know. Okay. There you go. Thank you very much for coming to the show, Ellen.

Give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs. Thank you. So it's ellenshell.com. And the book, again, is Slippery Beast, A True Crime Natural History of Eels. There you go. There you go. The exciting, riveting book of eels. Thanks for coming to the show, Ellen.

And thanks to Ronis for tuning in. Go to GoodReese.com, FortressCrispFoss, LinkedIn.com, FortressCrispFoss. CrispFoss is one of the TikTok and all those crazy places on the internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. And that's it.