A fascinating look inside the seedy black market for glass eels

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Originally published at: A fascinating look inside the seedy black market for glass eels | Boing Boing

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Have some of mine. My hovercraft is full of them.

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I’ve been looking for years for a source of canned elvers in NA, they are delicious!

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Obligatory…

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Beat me to it.

Also, that had pretty turned me off eels for life.

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I heard a fish scientist here in germany declare that eels were ‘functionally extinct’. Apparently the population in germany is too small to be self sustainable.

Which is incredibly depressing to me. I remember my yearly childhood ritual of lifting our semi-sunken plastic boat each spring, and it was always full of eels. Beautiful creatures. If you put them in a bucket, they will stick their prehistoric looking heads out of the water to look over the edge to plan their escape.

If they sense any water near enough (within 10 meters or so) they jump out and snake-wriggle back to the river.

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Way to go Maine, finding a niche market and owning it. I remember when entrepreneurs up there did the same with shiitake mushrooms and seaweed. There’s nothing quite like a summer job where you spend the night alternating between feeding seaweed into a conveyor for an hour and monitoring the temps, then going outside to watch the northern lights for an hour. Repeat until your spirit is renewed (and you go home ready for sleep).

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I love Unagi. They’re delicious if prepared by a good chef, but I’m off them until things get better.

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The mystery of eel reproduction:

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You owe me a new keyboard. And a Cheery Diet Coke I just spit all over it.

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