Oct
28th
Thu
28th
one dark night, usually in September or October, usually after rain and when the moon’s overcast, they get the call. No one knows why. They turn a kind of mottled green-black on top, silver underneath. They head downstream on the flood, and swim 3,000 miles back to the Sargasso Sea. Then they spawn, and die.” (Eels being eels, no one has actually seen this last bit happen. It’s scientific conjecture, a theory first elaborated in 1922 by a dedicated Dane, Johannes Schmidt, who devoted 15 years of his life to hunting tiny, almost transparent larvae 7mm long in the mid-Atlantic. And although no one has ever found an adult eel, let alone an egg, in the Sargasso Sea, no one has yet disproved his theory either.)
