From the Sublime...

...to Defra

The ocean turns here in a great gyre, hauled round by the swirling of the weather systems above and the spinning of the earth below. The sun drives the air round and the winds drive the waves round but at the centre there is stillness where the sea bed drops away to the depth of Everest. At the surface the buoyant rafts of sargassum weed are held by the four great ocean currents flowing around them. The marine life of this weed world circles slowly, twenty five thousand feet above the ocean floor, a home to creatures not normally found at the surface of the open ocean, where they live in this ecosystem of the floating weed mats. The sea bed below is dark and deeply mantled with the ocean snow of aeons that has always filtered down from the life nurtured by the weed, slowly sinking motes of all the dead things breaking up and falling fathom by fathom, fragments, gelatinous, lacking in substance but nutritious to strange creatures rising from the depth, creatures skeletal in their transparency, ghost fish almost too small to see, with huge eyes like dead fish on the beach. These creatures are born of a writhing of their parents, massing here from the freshwaters of three continents, coming back to their hatching place on the deep dead ocean floor where they writhe in the climax of their lives discharging their roe and their milt into the waters together, In this recombination of their DNA, a whole generation renews itself and dies there, a fertilisation creating leptocephali, leaf-like beings hatching and rising to meet and eat the particles of ocean snow drifting downwards. Slowly the leptocephali rise towards the currents that will swirl them out into the Atlantic, to merge with the plankton swarms of the open ocean.

Small as they are the leptocephali seem to have some control over where the ocean currents take them; those with American DNA head north towards the rivers of the Carolinas and of Maine, and the Maritime Provinces of Canada. Others head east over the Atlantic, playing one ocean current off against another as they rise and fall in the water column. The breeding seasons of American and European eels overlap and so do their genetics, and some of the leptocephali are hybrids that move north-east between these two great routes, ending up in Iceland. This link between heredity and destination suggests they already have some of the ability to navigate that they will need again when they return to breed, after ten or twenty years in the cool freshwater muds of Europe and America.  

Plankton eats and is eaten and many of its creatures are both predators and prey. As these leaf-like leptocephali move in the plankton, rising and falling, shunning the sun and lured upwards by the moon, they too eat and are eaten. If their role is to be the next generation of their species, it may also be to feed the other generations of creatures floating with them in the plankton. They were born of the great seasonal orgy of panmixia, the terminal excitement of their parents’ generation at the climax of their lives. From the quiet muds and lake beds the adult silver blue-eyed eels had suddenly thrown themselves into the turmoil of rivers in flood and been hurled out into the oceans, and had swum unerringly to the place where they were spawned. Here in their final spasms, half orgasm and half death-throes, they filled the water with their lives’ excitements and from their crisis grew these leaf-like creatures, now part of a similar panmixia of eating and being eaten, living to carry on the species or dying to nurture others. Eaten sometimes by small creatures but also perhaps by great whales too, sieving the plankton through baleen curtains, recirculating that ocean snow to grow to huge beasts bellowing in the deep like cattle.

Years, maybe, crossing the ocean currents driven by the same sun that made of the Sargasso a great gyre,  and winds storming east across the surface. Carried by the ocean but with some sense of direction, some ability to duck and dive in the twining currents and drifts so as to come close enough to Europe to start to sense the drumming of the waves against the Cliffs of Moher or the rocks of Morbihan.

So far the ocean wilderness, winds and water in constant motion, no fixity, nothing still or solid, no landmarks. No land here, but since long before the mind of man those rocks and creeks waiting there, rivers and fens and bogs, lands to penetrate in another panmixia, coming ashore so transparent that they are more milkiness than shoals, At the continental shelf they change from the leaf-like leptocephali to glass eels with transparent snaky bodies, and they start to ride the tides and catch the backwash of great rivers to penetrate whole continents. A red heart dot and two eye dots, and a grey thread of nerves where the spine will be. For interminable millennia they have massed in the estuaries, each individual part of a great shoal, one of the great migrations of the Earth, identical and inseparable and yet each with a separate destiny.

Much is unknown, and much almost impossible to discover. We have recently began to learn not to underestimate the skills and the senses of creatures as different from us as bees or elvers, and scientists now suspect that glass eels may use lunar signals, odours, salinity gradients, water currents and the earth’s magnetic field to navigate from pelagic shelf waters to shallow estuaries. The challenges of devising research methods to investigate such mechanisms is immense, but to accept that the lives of such apparently simple creatures might be anything but simple is both easier and more profound, for it can bring with it an inevitable respect for the natural world and a realisation that we have behaved towards such species with a complacency and an arrogance that, were we to be as superior as we think ourselves, would be unworthy of us.

These elvers are heading maybe for the River Severn, one of the greatest rivers of the UK, with a wide tidal mouth facing the west wind and the warm currents heading east over the Atlantic, an estuary with one of the highest tidal ranges. Eels are not the only migratory fish to travel between salt and fresh water here. No-one can know what causes some fish to spend both ends of their lives in one sort of water, and some fish to do the reverse. For many of them great estuaries are important not only because they funnel the migrating fish towards great rivers, but because the tides mix the salt and the fresh water here. Whichever direction migratory fish are travelling, whether from fresh to salt or from salt to fresh, estuaries permit a more gradual adaptation.

The destiny of each individual in this great migration might be to be eaten, or it might be to find its way at length to some great lake or fen, to live quietly, muddily, haunting dark places in overhanging banks, browsing nightly on the tiny creatures of the mud, sleeping through maybe a dozen winters until one summer the skin of its back starts to darken, its belly to grow silver and its eyes to expand. Its life in the mud has been asexual, and these changes are a kind of puberty, a new drive and a restlessness that will lead to its leaving its muddy adolescence behind and slipping off one wild night letting itself be carried down the river in the autumn floods, back out into the ocean to complete the circle of its life, to dance and mate and die, riding westward with all the adult eels of its generation and of the whole of Europe.

This river has many of these migratory fishes. There are salmon and sea trout that migrate into the rivers to mate and lay their eggs in the gravel ‘redds’ of the upper reaches. Lampreys come inland to mate too, using their parasitic sucker mouths to move stones to create the perfect nursery for their eggs. Two kinds of herring, the Twaite Shad and the Allis Shad, run up these rivers in May and June. Occasionally sturgeon may attempt to breed here too; they were once numerous enough in these rivers. And of course the eels, which have the opposite lifestyle, breeding in the sea but living for most of their lives in rivers, lakes and coastal waters

The river Severn and the other rivers that join the estuary, the Wye, the Parrett and the Usk, drain a huge area of Wales and the west of England. The drainage efforts of engineers and farmers to separate the water from the land in order to create new farmland is a one-way process, where water and soil and mud and more recently farm pollutants are despatched into the sea as quickly as possible, but for most of the history of the eel the boundaries between the land and water were fluid and flexible. Along this estuary the river merged into creeks and saltmarshes and pills, as the marshland rivers were called, and beyond them in great fens the waters flowed in and out and rose and fell where there was no firm line between the land and water. These fens were the most biodiverse places in the country. The landscape was porous; eels and elvers could penetrate wetlands and mires, ditches and ponds and wet riverine forests. The movement of all the migratory fishes exchanged nutrients between the sea and the land, and marine and freshwater ecosystems were fully connected. The migration of the elvers in springtime brought tons of nutrition into the ecosystems of the Severn catchment just as the birds and the fish and the mammals were raising their young and most in need of plentiful food supplies.

The arrival of people in these lands is very recent in the times of a species that was evolving as the continent of Europe drifted away from America, evolving to be able to swim the ever-widening Atlantic Ocean, 50 million years ago, oceans of ages before Aristotle wondered where elvers suddenly appeared from, and decided they were hairs given life force by the heat of the sun. But recently when they moved out of the plankton and started to shoal and to swim purposefully upstream in the Severn estuary they came to the huge metal flaps where the drains of the Levels come through the sea walls, and when they arrived in the river itself, there was a weir at Llantony, and at Maisemore a weir they can only cross at the highest tides, There were weirs at Tewkesbury and at Worcester, at Holt and Upper Lode, where elvers and eels could only pass if they slipped into the locks as the barges or the pleasure boats went through. Other fish too needed to pass this river to reach their breeding grounds. Twait shad, Allis shad, salmon, trout and lampreys as well as eels have benefitted from the construction of fish passes to help them past these obstacles on their ancestral migrations, passes built at last to try to avert extinctions, forced upon us by the European legislation to try to avert the eel decline.

Once when the elvers came into the rivers much of the landscape lay open to them. They could turn aside at the taste of water from any brook or river, and enter a vast network, a circulation that watered and drained and nourished whole continents. They might turn aside into the River Wye, draining more than a million acres and reaching over a hundred miles into mid-Wales. If they went on up the Severn they might travel over two hundred miles to the brooks running down off that same mountain.

No-one knows how many elvers should come up the Severn, The numbers arriving may always have been many more than would survive to populate a pristine river system. And maybe this is one of the greatest eel mysteries of all. Perhaps once the great baleen whales sieved more of them out of the ocean, or once plentiful tuna chased them. Maybe these millions could find places to live in the once-rich waterlands of England. We have no idea why they came in such numbers that the good folk of Somerset used to feed them to their pigs and sell them to the Taunton glue factory. We like to think that nature is in some way balanced and regulated so that the elvers should come ashore in the numbers needed to keep the population at some ideal level, When they arrive in huge numbers (though much less than in the past) we dare to wonder if nature has got it wrong. Is this a profligacy of nature, or is it the result of our interference at every stage of their life, from virtually exterminating the great baleen whales that might have sieved the leptocephali in the plankton, to the blocking of the rivers to power our mills and float our barges, the draining of marshlands by the rapacious landowners who drove the great enclosures and drainages, or the blind insensate profit-taking of investors who we thought we paid to keep pure the water in our rivers? We like to think of nature as if there were in fact a great intelligence contained within it, that arranges for the coastal forests of western USA to be fertilised by the shit of the bears that catch the returning salmon, rich with nutrients from far oceans. Is it possible that the elvers too fertilise our waterways and ecosystems and feed our wildlife whether they live or die as they bring ashore the nutrients they have sieved out of the Gulf Stream?

Faced with the ineffable, our officials calculate the f-able. Nature has ‘given us’ a surplus, just as it once gave us a ‘surplus’ of cod on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, now f’ed beyond recovery, and in the USA a surplus of Passenger Pigeons – once the most numerous bird on earth, now extinct. But it seems it is still tempting for the fishery scientists and administrators and civil servants to decide that nature has got it wrong and there are – extraordinary concept – too many elvers. They are surplus, and so we can head off to the riverbank with our elver nets to turn the inexplicable, the mysterious and extraordinary fish about which we still know so little, into beer money. A fish entwined with all that is extraordinary about our seas and our waterways, reduced to an ingredient, or seen as surplus because they pile up below the obstructions we have placed in the rivers, their ancient migration routes.

Our government departments, that have among their duties the protection and enhancement of the environment, seem prone to choose exploitation over protection, putting the interests of the elver merchant turning the ineffable into  Russian roubles before any valuation of the natural world outside their committees and policy discussions. Who among the officials dares to be the first to say Why? How did we get here? For whose benefit do we allow this pointless trade? What is it among our ideas and traditions and bureaucracies and departmental rivalries and personal and professional anxieties about our careers, that allows us to ignore the advice of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, year after year, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025… that there should be zero catches of eels in all habitats? Have we forgotten about the Dodo, the Passenger Pigeon, the Great Auk, the Mammoth, the Aurochs? The 80 mammals and 129  bird species lost since 1500? All extraordinary and irreplaceable but, tragically, effable.

Edited on 16 November 24 to add “I am not advocating a permanent ban on elver fishing or on eel fishing. ICES only issues this advice on a year-by-year basis. The intention was simply to contrast what I see as a squalid deal to sell elvers to a Russian commercial fishery with the clarity of the ICES call for a ban on fishing until the species is in recovery. Our priority and that of Defra and the EA should be the state of our rivers.”