The EconomistDecember 21st 2019 Eels 332 might pass muster with the authorities.
The fishing season is now limited to three months, starting in
late July in Hånsa’s case. But emptying traps and mending nets is a
small part of what being an eel fisherman is about these days. In
and out of season, afternoons at Hånsa’s are spent smoking eels.
For six hours 30 eels at a time are left hanging, like so many neck-
ties, over smouldering logs of elder wood from a local ridge. Drawn
in by the earthy smell, punters from a local campsite happily pay
395kr ($40) a pop, double the price for fresh eel.
A more boisterous sideline is the eel party. Three nights a week,
paying guests visit Hånsa’s cottage and its hotch-potch of nets,
hulls and rusting anchors. His wife, Maria, serves up eel in every
which way: boiled, fried, smoked, smoked then fried. The captain,
donning a stripy jumper and a cap he did not need on the boat,
brings out a guitar and belts out tunes such as “Eelvis Presley”.
Between songs, as revellers drink their schnapps, Hånsa re-
gales them with tales of the eel’s libido-enhancing powers—how
Freud missed this is not clear—and pins any blame on the falling
catches on hydropower dams. Having the eel listed as “critically
endangered” has kept some punters away from the parties, Hånsa
says, but others wonder if this might be their last chance.
Not all scientists agree the European eel is endangered in any
conventional way. Best estimates are that well over 1bn glass eels
still land on European shores every year. “It’s a seriously unusual
situation for a population of fish that numbers in the billions to be
declared an endangered species,” says Michael J. Miller, a research-
er at Nihon University in Japan. But the remarkable drop in adult
numbers needs to be addressed.
Europe’s conservation measures have also worked. Glass eel ar-
rivals are no longer falling and have seen a small increase in recent
years. Eels captured young and grown up in aquaculture tanks,
mainly in the Netherlands and Italy, represent two-thirds of all
European consumption.
But fish farms have to start with glass eels as their raw material.
This hardly matters in Europe, where enough larvae still drift in
from Sargasso to satiate the appetite of devotees. In Japan, on the
other hand, unagi kabayaki, eel that is grilled after being dipped in
a teriyaki-style sauce, is an enduring staple. Demand is greater
than can be supplied by catches of Anguilla japonica, a relative of
the European eel which is also listed as endangered.
China has stepped into the breach. Since 1990 eel farms have
proliferated there, mainly near Hong Kong. There are now at least
900 of them, and they increasingly sell to China as well as to Japan.
As China receives few glass eels of its own, it has scrambled to find
some for its farms. Rare Japanese glass eels can fetch up to $30,000
a kilo. But European eels can be procured for around €300 a kilo in
France or Spain. Given a kilo of glass eels contains 3,000 fish that,
once grown, will yield fillets worth a total of over €25,000, the re-
sult has been a predictable boom in eel smuggling.
According to Europol, the eupolice agency, around 100 tonnes
of live glass eels are exported illegally from Europe to China every
year. That is 300m baby fish—roughly a quarter of the entire stock
of eels that makes it from the Sargasso to the coast of Europe. By
numbers trafficked, there is no bigger wildlife crime.
Chinese gangs, aided by locals, establish pop-up aquariums in
garages and warehouses. One den raided by the Spanish authori-
ties in 2018 had a wall lined with 364 suitcases. Each could be load-
ed with 10 bags of 10,000 wet baby eels each, weighing about 30kg
in all. The eels smuggled from Europe to China yield fish sold for
over €2bn says Andrew Kerr of the Sustainable Eel Group, a lobby-
ing outfit in Brussels. Eel busts are now happening across Europe.
In the year to June, Europol said it had seized over 17m eels and that
154 people had been arrested in Europe on eel-smuggling charges.
Assuming demand from Japan and China will not abate, the
long-term prospects of the eel look murky unless Schultze’s “eel
question” can be answered once and for all, and eels can be con-
vinced to go through their whole life cycle in captivity.
Given its continued appetite for the fish, Japan is
now where the eel-research action is taking place. The
spawning ground of the Japanese eel was finally dis-
covered in 1991 (it lies off the coast of Guam, a mere
2,000-3,000 km away from where grown eels end up).
Researchers there have come tantalisingly close to
making eels spawn. Specimens in captivity have been
made to produce larvae. But no one has yet cracked
what food those larvae will eat.Eel defined
Such a world of international smuggling and cutting-
edge research feels like a world away at M. Manze in the
south-east of London. A blue plaque on the wall desig-
nates it as the oldest surviving eel-and-pie joint in the
city, dating back to 1892.
Until a few years ago, eels lived in an aquarium in-
side the restaurant, from which the chef would grab
them. The Cockney dish of “jellied eels” involves boil-
ing thick slices of fish, then allowing them to set in its
own translucent stock. They go for £3.90 ($5) a bowl, to
be eaten with lots of pepper and vinegar.
Jellied eels lack the crunchiness and bacon-like tex-
ture of Hånsa’s smoked eels and the flavour of unagi. To
a modern palate, they are the culinary equivalent of a
gramophone: a relic from another era. Most customers
on a recent visit were tucking into meat pies. “The old-
er clientele still go for them,” a waitress claims.
Only a handful of eel-and-pie shops still remain. At
one in Walthamstow the restaurant is turned into “The
Jellied Eel”, a pop-up cocktail bar, at the weekend. A
website reassures potential patrons “there thankfully
won’t be a single jellied eel in sight”. Even from its own
menu, the eel has learned to slink away.
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