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How the mysteries of the eel’s sex life have inspired a bestseller

“There’s a heron in the book, too,” Patrik Svensson calls over after we notice the bird perched in the willow tree under whose arches the writer is being photographed. In The Gospel of the Eels, the 48-year-old journalist’s extraordinary, prizewinning book on “the world’s most enigmatic fish”, such coincidences happen a lot.

The willow he describes in the book – the tree under which he fishes at night with his father as a boy – reappears in a later chapter in the willow-leaf shape of eels’ larvae. The bats that flit over their heads return, first in his account of a philosophy article about what it’s like to be one, and then in the work of an 18th-century Italian scientist and eel researcher that he explores.

And now here’s the heron – like the bird he describes flying silently overhead as father and son arise at dawn to inspect their fishing lines. Svensson had doubts over whether readers would accept these strange recurrences, or indeed want to read a book about eels at all.

But even before it won Sweden’s August Prize last year, sales were taking off, and it is now on the way to becoming this year’s surprise US hit, helped along by laudatory reviews in the New York Times and the New Yorker. You don’t expect anything like this to happen when it’s your first book and you are writing a book about eels. 

Patrik Svensson

“It’s amazing. You don’t expect anything like this to happen when it’s your first book and you are writing a book about eels,” Svensson admits. “I thought it was kind of nerdy. “I wasn’t sure there was a story about my father,” he adds. “He was a very normal man in a way, and the kind of man that you don’t usually write books about.”

The willow leaves and bats came of themselves. “I feel like it was almost out of my control because I didn’t make these up,” he says, although they provided a welcome link between the story of the eels and that of his boyhood relationship with his road-builder father.

“That was when the two stories connected, and when I decided that I would allow myself to use these as metaphors.” But such is his skill that the echoes and parallels he finds never seem stretched. It’s as if the eel’s mysteriousness is snaking out, beyond its extraordinary life cycle and uncanny ability to confound scientists, and into the writing.

Both his vivid accounts of moonlit eel-fishing – his father hammering a thrashing eel to a wooden board with a five-inch nail through the head – and his treatment of science’s struggle to understand this mysterious creature are strong enough to have stood alone.

At the centre of the book is “the eel question”, the mystery over the breeding habits of a fish which seems to have no sex at all. It’s a question that has obsessed scientists since Aristotle, and which drew the 19-year-old Sigmund Freud to spend a month fruitlessly dissecting eels in search of their elusive testicles.

We now know that it is only in the fourth and final stage of the eel’s life cycle that they develop reproductive organs, before they make their journey to breed in the Sargasso Sea, northeast of Cuba.

Or we think that’s what they do. “You can call it a mystery, but it’s also just a crazy fact,” Svensson says, “but no one has ever seen eels breed, and no one has ever seen eels in the Sargasso Sea. It becomes a philosophical question: how do we really know the things we do?”

A reptile with its mouth open: No one has ever seen eels breed and no one has seen them in the Sargasso Sea. Photograph: Picture Partners/Alamy© Provided by The Guardian No one has ever seen eels breed and no one has seen them in the Sargasso Sea. Photograph: Picture Partners/Alamy

Svensson’s uneducated but animal-loving father had told him about the eels’ double journey across the Atlantic – drifting to Europe with the ocean currents, then powering back against them as mature eels. “Just the name, the Sargasso Sea, sounded like a fairytale place to me, and he told me that they could be very old, and that started this fascination.”

But his interest, like the eels, lay lurking for decades until an editor at the culture section of the Sydsvenskan newspaper where Svensson works suggested “mysticism” as the theme for their Christmas 2012 edition. “I had never thought about it before, but I just kind of blurted out, ‘Well, I could write something about the eels, they’re … quite … mysterious’.”

He went on to bring together his father, the Christian story and the eels, into a wonderfully playful essay (Aristotle’s belief in eels’ spontaneous generation mirroring the virgin birth, and the way they are skinned by being nailed to a wooden post, the crucifixion).

It was only when he began researching the book that he realised how many others the eel had caught in its slimy grip. “I wasn’t just going to ask ‘what do we know about the eel?’, but, ‘how do we know the things we know?’. If you ask that question, you find all these amazing stories and characters.”

There’s Johannes Schmidt, the Dane who spent two lonely decades trawling the Atlantic for glass eels and larvae, slowly zeroing in on the Sargasso Sea. There are novelists like Günter Grass, Graham Swift and Sweden’s Fritiof Nilsson Piraten, for whom the eel serves as a potent symbol. How, he asks, did the 19-year-old Freud’s failure to find the testicles of an eel feed into his theories of human sexuality? “He looking through his microscope … and what he can see through the lens is no longer just an eel, it is also himself.”

When discussing Schmidt, he writes, “a person seeking the origin of something is also seeking his own origin”. And this is true for Svensson too. “For the eel, its lifecycle is never complete until it has returned to the Sargasso Sea, and I can relate to that,” he says. “Writing the book is a way for me to write myself back to my own Sargasso Sea.”

In the final chapter, there’s another coincidence, when he encounters an eel in the lake by his parents’ summer cabin. Neither father nor son has seen one there before. It is just after his father’s funeral, and it convinces him his father, in some sense, is still with him.

“There’s no meaning at all in those coincidences,” he admits. “But there is a meaning for me.”

Reference: The Guardian: Richard Orange 13 hrs : 30/08/2020

Dying mother dolphin struggles to save baby in Mauritius lagoon after oil spill

NAIROBI (Reuters) - The baby dolphin rolled over on its side, floating on the surface. Its mother repeatedly nudged its head above the oily waves in a lagoon in Mauritius, where environmentalists are demanding an investigation into the deaths of dozens of dolphins following an oil spill.

The footage - obtained by Reuters from a fisherman who tried to help rescue the dolphins - showed the last desperate moments of the mother and her calf before they both died.

At least 40 dolphins have been found dead in Mauritius - 38 who washed ashore, as well as the mother and her baby - since Monday, when a Japanese ship was scuttled after running aground in July and leaking oil.

The death toll may rise: Yasfeer Heenaye, the 31-year-old fisherman who filmed the mother and baby, said he saw nearly 200 dolphins inside the reef Friday morning, 25-30 of them dead.

"Some were injured and some were just floating," Heenaye said. Fishermen were trying to herd the dolphins out of the lagoon into the open seas.

"Inside the reef there is oil spill on the water - if they stay inside maybe all of them will die - but if they go outside maybe they will survive. We were trying to push the dolphins outside the reef, making noise in the boat to make the dolphins go outside the reef," he said.

"There was a mother and her baby. ...He was very tired, he didn't swim well. But the mum stayed alongside him, she didn't leave her baby to go with the group. All the way she stayed with him. She was trying to protect him ...to push the baby to get back with the group."

But the baby wallowed on its side and died in front of them, floating on the waves, he said.

"When I was seeing this, there was tears in my eyes. I am a parent of a little daughter, it is very difficult for me to see the mother struggle and try her best to save her baby," Heenaye said.

A short while later, the mother had convulsions and died too, said another witness, Reuben Pillay.

(This story corrects first name of fisherman to Yasfeer from Yasfeen in paragraph 4)

Reference: reuters: By Katharine Houreld 1 day ago: 29/08/2020: (Editing by Peter Graff)

20 amazing animal tongues

Don't underestimate the tongue, a muscular organ that humans use for licking, breathing, tasting, swallowing and speaking. But this organ varies widely in color, shape, length and function across the animal kingdom. Whereas human tongues are pink and typically just over 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) long, the anteater has a 2-foot-long (60 cm) tongue and the blue-tongued skink, well …

Here's a look at 20 amazing animal tongues (including the chameleon's shown here) and the science behind them.

If you've ever seen a giraffe's impressive 21-inch-long (53 cm) tongue, you'll know that it's not pink. Rather, the tallest living animal in the world has a dark-colored tongue that looks like a mix of purple, blue and black. That's because giraffes (genus Giraffa) tongues are covered with a lot of the pigment melanin, which acts as a type of sunblock to protect the licker while it reaches for tender leaves, Live Science previously reported.

Giraffes have such long tongues that they can even use them to clean out their ears, according to Mental Floss.

The Gila monster (Heloderma suspectum) lives up to the "monster" part of its name with its forked tongue. It's thought that the gila's forked tongue helps it smell in "three dimensions," meaning that the two tips can pick up the same odor and then distinguish the wafting chemical gradients in the air, which, in turn, helps the reptile zero-in on the location of the smell's source, Andrew Durso, a herpetologist at Florida Gulf Coast University, wrote in The Conversation.

When the venomous lizard gets hungry, it flicks its sensitive tongue in and out, picking up chemical information about its surroundings. Then, the Gila monster's Jacobson's organ, a part of the olfactory (smelling) system in its nasal chamber, analyzes this information, letting the lizard know whether potential prey, such as small mammals, frogs, lizards, rodents and insects, are nearby, Live Science previously reported.

As the only known mammal with scales, pangolins are weird creatures. Their sticky tongues are just as strange. The pangolin's tongue is connected not to the bottom of its mouth, but to the bottom of its ribcage. When it's not busy snatching up insects, such as ants and termites, the tongue hangs out in the pangolin's chest cavity, Live Science previously reported.

When the pangolin's tongue is extended, it can measure up to 16 inches (40 cm) long, or longer than the animal's head and body combined, according to the BBC.

The tongue of the sun bear (Helarctos malayanus) is surprisingly long, measuring up to 10 inches (25 cm), the Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre reports. This feature helps the bear channel its inner Winnie the Pooh; its lengthy tongue can extract honey from beehives, a trick that landed it the nickname of "honey bear," according to National Geographic.

Much of the hippo's evolutionary history remains shrouded in mystery, according to National Geographic. Their giant tongues are no exception. In a 2010 study published in the journal The Anatomical Record, researchers looked at the tongues of a young and old common hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius amphibius) with scanning electron microscopy and conventional light microscopy. (The 49-year-old female hippo's tongue was 24 inches (60 cm) long, while the 4-year-old male's was 18 inches (45 cm) long.)

The team found that hippo tongues have features similar to a few types of animals: odd-toed ungulates (such as donkeys, which digest plant cellulose in the intestines, not the stomach), ruminants (such as cattle, which have four-chambered stomachs) and omnivorous, non-ruminant mammals (such as pigs, which have simple stomachs).

Meanwhile, hippos use their three-chambered stomachs to help them digest grass. The animal's herbivorous diet and unique evolutionary history may explain "these mixed morphological features of the tongue," the researchers wrote in the study.

Which tongue has more bristles than a hairbrush? It's none other than the penguin's.

The penguin's tongue does not have taste buds, but it does have loads of bristles made out of keratin, the fibrous protein that makes up human hair and nails. These bristles help the penguin grab wriggly krill and fish, according to the Smithsonian.

Woodpecker tongues — made of bone, cartilage and muscle — need to be really, really long so the birds can nab grubs hiding deep in trees. But a woodpecker's mouth isn't big enough to house that long tongue. So, what's the workaround? When it's not in use, the tongue goes into "self storage" by wrapping around the woodpecker's skull.

"The cordlike base of the tongue extends back out of their mouth on each side, winding behind and onto the top of their head, sometimes extending so far forward that it reaches the nostril," Larry Witmer, a professor of anatomy and paleontology with the Department of Biomedical Sciences at Ohio University, told Live Science. "When they need to unleash the weapon, the tongue basically unwinds from around the head to project into a crevice to capture its prey.

It's a remarkable mechanism that's evolved independently in several kinds of birds, including hummingbirds."

You can check out this video of Witmer describing a red-bellied woodpecker skull and tongue.

This technically isn't a real tongue; it's a parasite that destroys a fish's tongue and then becomes a "substitute" tongue. In other words, this bug-like creature (Cymothoa Exigua) is a tongue-eating parasite.

After the parasite enters through the fish's gills, it latches onto the tongue with its seven pairs of legs and (brace yourself) begins to feed on the tongue like a vampire. Soon, the tongue withers and drops off, but the parasite remains, masquerading as the fish's new tongue, Live Science previously reported.

Just like other cats, the mighty lion (Panthera leo) uses its tongue to groom its fur. Feline tongues are very effective combs; they're covered with tiny spines known as papillae, which are sharp, hollow and curved backward toward the cat's throat, according to a 2018 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These spines help the cat deliver cleansing saliva to its fur, which later cools the cat as it evaporates.

Cats don't care whether their prey tastes sweet, however. Their tongues have a useless version of the gene Tas1r2, which encodes proteins that combine to form sugar-detecting sensors on the tongue, National Geographic reported.

Watch out! If the giant leaf-tailed gecko (Uroplatus fimbriatus) feels threatened, it will make sure you do, too. When this gecko is disturbed, it opens its jaws wide, flashing its bright red mouth and tongue before it releases a piercing distress call that sounds just like a child's scream, Smithsonian's National Zoo reports.

Frogs are famous for their fast tongues, and for good reason. More than 4,000 frog species can grab objects with their tongues faster than the human eye can blink, according to the website of Alexis Noel, a research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute who studies frog and cat tongues. She noted that frog mouths have a unique anatomy: "Unlike humans, frog tongues are connected at the front of the lower jaw, rather than at the back of the throat."

In addition to its speed, the frog tongue is strong. The tongue of the horned frog can pull objects that are about 1.4 times the frog's body weight, a 2014 study in the journal Scientific Reports found.

Blue-tongued skinks, natives of Australia and New Guinea, use their vibrant blue tongue to startle predators, according to the San Diego Zoo. When threatened, the skink puffs up its body so that it appears larger, opens its mouth and hisses while it sticks out its tongue.

Eagles have tongues with backward-facing barbs called "rear-directed papillae," which help them swallow prey, according to the Center for Conservation Biology, a research group at the College of William and Mary and the Virginia Commonwealth University. When eagle parents are feeding their young, they use their tongues to help keep away large bones, furry chunks and sharp fins that could cause the chicks to choke, according to the Raptor Resource Project, a nonprofit bird group based in Iowa.

The alligator-snapping turtle (Macrochelys temminckii) has a clever trick; it uses its little pink tongue as a fishing lure. While these turtles are known to forage for food along the bottoms of rivers, lakes and swamps, they can also lie still with their mouths open and tongues wriggling, as they wait to ambush fish that mistake their tongues for worms, according to the Nonindigenous Aquatic Species program of the U.S. Geological Survey.

How do parrots and parakeets (a type of parrot) mimic human speech? It turns out that Polly can adjust her nimble, muscular tongue so that it modulates the sound coming from her voice box, according to Science magazine. In one small experiment, repositioning the tongue of five dead monk parakeets (Myiopsitta monachus), whose vocal tracts were connected to speaker systems, led to changes in pitch and loudness, which is key for forming vowels in speech, according to a 2004 study in the journal Current Biology.

While humans might take note of the emperor tamarin's distinctive mustache, its fellow emperor tamarins (Saguinus imperator) may have their eyes on something else: the tongue. When these primates are displeased, they tend to flick their tongues, quickly moving the tongue in and out of the mouth, according to Apenheul Primate Park, a zoo in the Netherlands. The emperor tamarin also communicates with chirps, whistles and facial expressions, which, combined with tongue flicking, help keep its troop together and alert to danger, according to Zoo New England in Massachusetts.

That hairy appendage dangling out of a fly's mouth may look like a tongue, but it's not. Scientists call it the labellum, and it's the primary taste organ for the Drosophila fruit fly, according to a report from Indiana Public Media. The labellum is attached to the fly's straw-like proboscis, which allows the pest to slurp up food. A word to the wise: Put your leftovers away if you've got a fly problem. These buzzing beasties puke saliva and digestive juices onto food before eating it, because these acids dissolve the food the fly wants to suck up, according to HowStuffWorks.

The giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla) doesn't have teeth, but it doesn't need them; instead, it uses its roughly 2-foot-long (60 cm) tongue to eat up to 30,000 ants and termites a day, according to the San Diego Zoo. This narrow and spaghetti-like tongue, which is attached to the mammal's sternum, is covered with tiny, backward-pointing spines and sticky saliva to help it grab the tiny insects. The anteater's tongue is fast, too — it can dart in and out of its mouth up to 150 times a minute.

Chameleons are relatively slow creatures, but their 20-inch-long (50 cm) tongues are fast enough to catch speedy insects, such as locusts, mantids and grasshoppers. The tip of the chameleon's tongue is a ball of muscle, and once it hits prey, that ball transforms into a suction cup. The instant the prey is stuck, the reptile draws its tongue back into its mouth, where its strong jaws crush the catch, according to the San Diego Zoo.

Hummingbird tongues were misunderstood for more than 180 years, until a 2015 study set the record straight. Initially, scientists thought that hummingbird tongues used capillary action — in which liquid can flow through narrow channels, even against gravity — to pull up floral nectar. But actually, these tongues act as elastic micropumps, according to the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

High-speed videos showed that the hummingbird flattens the tip of its outstretched tongue against a desirable flower, then reshapes its tongue so it can fill with nectar. Next, the top of the tongue (the part by the mouth) bends, which produces elastic energy that can draw the nectar out of the flower. This process lets the bird slurp up its food at fast speeds, the study found.

Reference: Live Science: Laura Geggel 1 day ago: 29/08/2

Warsaw zoo tests effect of hemp oil on elephants' stress

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Scientists at Warsaw's zoo have been taking blood, saliva and other samples from the zoo's three elephants in recent days to prepare to test whether giving them hemp oil can reduce their stress.

Dr. Agnieszka Czujkowska, a zoo veterinarian, said hemp oil, also known as CBD, or cannabidiol oil, has been shown to reduce anxiety and stress in other animals, including horses and dogs.

The zoo’s experts thought it made sense to see if could also help their animals, including giraffes, rhinos and polar bears. They decided, however, to start their tests on their three African elephants, who have undergone a period of stress following the death in March of a fellow older female, Erna.

“Basically stress is everywhere and we don't know what's going to happen in the future," she said. "Maybe one of the elephants will be pregnant, maybe there will be some kind of injury sometimes. They can break a tusk — it happens. They can get sick for no reason,” she said.

“We want to have something that will let them smoothly go through this period.”

While the study has drawn sensationalist headlines, Czujkowska explained that hemp oil is not a drug and is different from marijuana because it does not contain THC, the main psychoactive compound in cannabis.

If the study works as hoped, the oil will merely “calm them down a little bit," and have anti-inflammatory and other benefits, she told The Associated Press on Friday as the animals ate large branches behind her.

“It will work in different ways but it will not give them any high,” she said. “Hemp oil is not a drug."

"We would never apply anything that is dangerous to animals,” she added.

She and zookeepers brought the sole male elephant, Leon, into a pen Friday and from outside a protective cage they reached in to draw blood and take saliva samples. He obeyed his keepers as they ordered him to raise his trunk so they could take saliva swabs.

Some 300 samples — of blood, saliva, urine and feces — have been taken over the past week in preparation.

Among other things, the scientists are measuring the elephants' levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. If all goes as planned, they will be able to start administering drops of hemp oil in a few weeks but it's expected to take up to two years to get results from the study, Czujkowska said.

After Erna's death, the remaining two females have struggled to establish a hierarchy.

The 23-year-old Fryderyka, also known as Fredzia, has long tried to control the other female, Buba, also 23, but was kept in check to some degree by Erna, who helped to resolve conflicts.

Since Erna's death, Fredzia in particular has shown greater levels of stress as she tries to control Buba's eating and other behaviors.

Fredzia “is stressed because she is the boss of the herd. It’s like having a boss, 10 employees and suddenly eight are laid off, and this boss has nothing to do," said Patryk Pyciński, a mammal expert at the zoo who is involved in the elephant study.

He said the zoo's scientists hope that reducing stress levels will also allow Fredzia to conceive. He said if she has her own own offspring to guide, it could reduce her impulse to dominate Buba and lessen tensions in the group.

Reference: By VANESSA GERA, Associated Press 1 day ago: 28/08/2020