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Where Do Eels Come From?
- antsar 6y agoInteresting topic but this article was tedious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eel_life_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eel_life_history TLDR: They spawn in a few places out in the ocean, then migrate toward coasts as they mature. European & American eel: North of the Antilles, Haiti, and Puerto Rico Japanese eel: Near the Mariana Islands South African eel: North of Madagascar
- billfruit 6y agoI think this type of descent into "storytelling" is one of the anti-patterns of modern journalistic writing. Why isn't there a major push back against these anti-patterns among journalists, I often wonder.
- jl6 6y agoAlthough the linked article was refreshingly readable, the general answer to your question is because more text = more opportunity to weave adverts in between the paragraphs. Storytelling is an easy way to bulk out the text when your facts are light. Also, to be less cynical, some people are after entertainment as much as education, and will enjoy reading a story rather than a lecture.
- mason55 6y agoYeah interestingly the New Yorker does not split articles with ads in the middle. It’s one of their things. I love the New Yorker and enjoy all of its quirks.
- yborg 6y agoI think this kind of complaint about the elegant use of language in writing is one of the anti-patterns of a modern society trained to communicate in 140 character ALL CAPS shouting. One of the things that I always find fascinating is the level of expression you find in everyday letters by everyday people written in the 19th century. It seems very sad that despite the fact that long form writing is much easier now than when it had to be hand-written in ink people no longer have the patience for writing or reading it.
- billfruit 6y agoI am not complaining about elegant use of language; Use of rich language to express complex and nuanced concepts is a good thing. But presenting the whole matter as "Story" is what I find uninteresting, and oftentimes misleading. Give us the facts, the theories and explanations; but telling it as "Story" does really a disservice to readers, and even seems against the spirit of journalism.
- danharaj 6y agoWhat exactly is the spirit of journalism and how did you come to know it through your study of the history of journalism?
- TeMPOraL 6y agoWell, the gold standard is what journalists call "inverted pyramid". You start with a TL;DR, and then expand recursively. This way, the reader can get more and more detailed picture as they read on, and stop at the moment they feel they've satisfied their needs. This is how you present information if you care about your reader. The reason it's not done almost anywhere is because maximizing profit is done by minimizing utility, so that you can drag the curious reader through as many ads as they have patience to bear.
- achn 6y agoThis is the New Yorker! It is not written as a Wikipedia article or even a science article. The New Yorker has a long history with its own voice. You are not necessarily wrong in a generalized statement, but this is not the piece to raise this opinion against.
- ncmncm 6y agoWhat you describe is a way to write newspaper articles for impatient and overburdened readers who probably won't finish reading them. New Yorker stories have a different purpose and a different audience. People who subscribe to the New Yorker like it because it gives them stories written just this way. If you don't, wikipedia is right there. You can tell it will be a New Yorker story because it says so. I guarantee you that the writing is not that way to "drag" anyone through ads or to strain their patience.
- Larrikin 6y agoIf I had read the story on the toilet at work I would have found this style extremely annoying since has presented as a mystery at the beginning of the article. Reading this story at home on my chick I found it extremely interesting. Not everything has to be a quick read and the article does a good job of introducing the topic so that one can just wikipedia it if they have to
- toby 6y agoI thought it was pretty fascinating to read the story of how obsessed scientists enlisted sailors to find smaller and smaller elvers to figure this out. The actual location isn't the interesting part. I also had no idea that no one has ever seen them mate.
- nerdponx 6y agoExcept, according to the article, we've never even seen mature eels in the Sargasso Sea, we've never seen them mate, and we don't know why their population has fallen so much over a few decades.
- pvaldes 6y ago> we don't know why their population has fallen so much Nope, nom, nom, we don't know, nom, nom, why they got so scarce. Is a mystery.
- EdwardDiego 6y agoDoesn't cover Australian or New Zealand eels. The NZ longfinned eel (Anguilla dieffenbachii) is believed to spawn in the Tonga Trench: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonga_Trench https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonga_Trench
- getlawgdon 6y agoFunny. As if declaring your opinion changed people's tastes.
- FriendlyNormie 6y agoWhy do people insist on acting as if humans a few hundred years ago were completely retarded? No, Aristotle didn’t think eels spontaneously came into existence from mud and rain water. No, no one ever thought eels came from horse hair. They were all joking. Obviously. You do understand jokes are not a brand new phenomenon, right?
- csours 6y agoI wonder how many things I think I know the answer to but I really don't. I find the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions very interesting.
- oliveshell 6y agoYes! I point friends to that article all the time. The first time I read through it I was surprised at how many of those things I’d always just assumed to be true.
- staticautomatic 6y agoStrong opinions, loosely held!
- divbzero 6y agoThank you! Corrected a few of my own misconceptions: - Microwave ovens do not heat food due to resonance with water molecules. - Spacecraft reentering the atmosphere are not heated due to friction. - Worldwide poverty has not been increasing.
- agapon 6y agoI wonder if adiabatic compression in front of a reentering spacecraft could even occur if not for friction.
- ars 6y agoI think you should ask instead "if not for viscosity". And I think the answer is yes, for reasons of momentum. If you try to push air out of the way it in turn needs to move other air, etc, etc. Even with zero viscosity, it still needs to to that, which means the pressure goes up, and will therefor heat up.
- hnick 6y agoIs viscosity not a form of friction, just at microscopic level? Honest question. Google seemed to be of two minds.
- mhb 6y agoI guess that the New Yorker doesn't extend the same disapprobation to ending a headline with a preposition as it does to writing "naïve" or "coöperate" without diaeresis.
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- teddyh 6y ago> disapprobation to ending a headline with a preposition There is no such rule. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preposition_stranding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preposition_stranding
- dang 6y agoChurchill didn't make the famous joke about it either. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/04/churchill-preposition/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/04/churchill-prepositi...
- nerdponx 6y agohttps://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/prepositions-ending-a-sentence-with https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/prepositions-e...
- protoweek 6y agoThis was a very strange, disconnected and fragmented article by the New Yorker Why dint they break down the supply chain linearly?
- ncmncm 6y agoIt is sad, tragic even, that the great writing on natural history is closed you by your own impatience. This article is not the best of its kind, but it is very, very good. Writing that excels it would frustrate you more, in proportion to its quality. The frustration you feel reading it is a pale echo of that experienced by the myriad scientists and amateurs who puzzled in and out of decades over these questions, originally obscure but enlarged by their obdurity to have become symbolic of questions of our own existence.
- hpliferaft 6y agoOh please. OP offered a position and asked a simple, direct question. That is customary here. Your bloviation about great writing offers nothing except a great example of a style you won't find in the New Yorker.
- AtlasBarfed 6y agoIt's a complaint about a long form article. From the New Yorker! If you don't like long form articles and you see it is the New Yorker, then don't read it.
- ncmncm 6y agoIf he wanted a quick rundown on the eel life cycle, wikipedia is one click away. That obviously wasn't the purpose of the story.
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- coburnVcoburn 6y agoit was written this way to capture the mystery of the eel, and reflect the tone of the book that is being reviewed.
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- zetazzed 6y agoIf this article develops your interest in eels, I highly recommend following "Surprised Eel Historian" (https://twitter.com/greenleejw https://twitter.com/greenleejw) on Twitter for approximately daily facts about the role of eels in medieval English society. (Yes, there are really hundreds of new English eel history facts per day.)
- alleycat5000 6y agoThere is a good RadioLab on this! https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/silky-love https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/silky...
- mesozoic 6y agoWhen a mommy eel and a daddy eel love one another...
- grawprog 6y agoCool, i never realized eels had such a complex life cycle and i didn't know we took so long to learn and understand it. It's interesting when you compare it to species such as salmon where their life cycle has been understood fairly in depth, independently on two continents for well over 1000 years. Yet salmon also have a fairly complicated that varies from species to species.
- Tiktaalik 6y agoI think we understand the basic framework of the Salmon lifecycle but we don't really understand all the details. Certainly not enough to be able to estimate salmon run numbers. Like unexpected weather, scientists are regularly stumped by extraordinary unexpected amounts of salmon returning to streams both wildly over and under expectations.
- grawprog 6y agoTrue, but by comparison where the separate life stages of eels were believed to be entirely different species up until the 1800', salmon were relatively well known both in North America and Japan. It was understood what Fry and smolts were. The different species and their specific breeding cycles, including which rivers would contain which species in a given season were known and there was generally a large 'industry' and culture built around them on both sides of the Pacific. Likewise, from what that article says, eels were a heavy part of many cultures, yet the beliefs around them were fairly ignorant, for lack of a better word, by comparison.
- spsrich2 6y agoI have often eaten eels but I have never considered how they work
- dejongh 6y agoIt was a pleasure to read this article. Lots of fun facts and well written. Thanks.
- ngcc_hk 6y agoShould say is eel extinct soon ? More click bite and is actually the reason why such an urgent search.
- irrational 6y agoIs it just me, or does this article not answer where eels come from? They are from the Sargasso Sea! Oh wait, except we actually went there and checked and... nope. No eels. Is the article correct that we still have never seen eels mate and have no idea how/where they do it?
- ncmncm 6y agoExactly.