Slippery Beast
A True Crime Natural History, with Eels
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
"It’s part natural history, part true crime, and buckets of slippery, slimy fun. You won’t be able to put it down."—The Nature Conservancy
"Revelatory—and sometimes shocking... Slippery Beast brings exhaustive research and interviews to bear on a subject of surprising richness."—Wall Street Journal
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Shell (A Child's Place), a professor of science journalism at Boston University, delves into the international eel market with rigorous research and welcome humor in this beguiling account. Among other startling trivia, she notes that there are more than 800 varieties of eels, that they have survived for 200 million years and live in the waters of six continents, and that they comprise a $5 billion industry. Interviews with colorful industry figures including Sara Rademaker, who runs the only sustainable eel farm in the U.S., reveal more fascinating facts about the "slippery beasts." For example, how eels navigate to their spawning sites remains a mystery, as does the most efficient method for breeding them in captivity. Other memorable sections feature a Maine fisherman known as the "Eel Godfather," who spent time in prison for poaching, and shine a light on the worldwide illegal eel trade, which is led by Chinese smugglers and the yakuza, the latter of whom account for nearly 40% of all eel sales in Japan. Throughout, Shell balances her meticulous reporting with a sly appreciation for the absurdity of her subject and a novelist's gift for characterization. Fans of Susan Orlean will love this.
