ǣl
ael
Old English
“Nobody has ever seen an eel reproduce. For 2,400 years — from Aristotle to the 21st century — the eel's breeding life remained a complete mystery. Freud spent a summer trying to find eel gonads. He failed.”
Old English ǣl comes from Proto-Germanic *ēlaz, of uncertain further origin. The word has been in English since the language began. German Aal, Dutch aal, Old Norse āll — all name the same snake-shaped fish. The simplicity of the word belies the complexity of the animal. Eels are among the most mysterious creatures in biology.
Aristotle wrote that eels arose spontaneously from mud, because he could never find their reproductive organs. In 1876, a nineteen-year-old Sigmund Freud was assigned to find eel gonads at the University of Vienna's marine biology station in Trieste. He dissected over 400 eels. He found nothing conclusive. It was his first published paper and his first professional failure.
The European eel (Anguilla anguilla) breeds in the Sargasso Sea — a region of the North Atlantic east of Bermuda. The larvae drift on ocean currents for one to three years to reach Europe's rivers. No one has ever observed eel reproduction in the wild. No one has successfully bred European eels in captivity. The entire life cycle — how they find the Sargasso Sea, how they mate, how they die — remains incomplete.
Danish marine biologist Johannes Schmidt spent 18 years (1904-1922) tracking eel larvae across the Atlantic to determine the spawning location. He narrowed it to the Sargasso Sea but never saw an adult eel there. His research was heroic and inconclusive. The eel that has been eaten, trapped, and traded across Europe for millennia keeps its reproductive secrets absolutely private.
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Today
The European eel population has declined by over 90% since the 1970s. The animal that nobody can breed in captivity is disappearing from the wild. Conservation is difficult when you do not fully understand the life cycle of the thing you are trying to save.
Freud failed with the eels and moved on to the human unconscious. Schmidt spent nearly two decades on the question and died without a definitive answer. The eel guards its reproductive life with a completeness that makes human privacy look amateur. Some mysteries resist every tool we throw at them. The eel is still winning.
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