Why We Haven’t Learned More In 101 Years Of Trying
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- Опубликовано: 19 июн 2024
- Almost everything we know about the reproductive practices of European eels comes from a genius study conducted more than 100 years ago.
LEARN MORE
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To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:
- European Eel: A long-lived, snakelike fish native to the rivers of Europe.
- Eel, Pie, and Mash: A common meal of poorer Englishmen for the last several centuries.
- Spontaneous Generation: The hypothetical process by which organisms would generate from non-living matter.
- The Eel Question: A matter of great debate for millenia - specifically: how do eels reproduce and where do they come from?
- Sargasso Sea: A region of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Bermuda bounded by four currents forming an ocean gyre that is recognizable by the large presence of Sargassum seaweed.
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REFERENCES
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Schmidt, J. (1923). The Breeding Places of the Eel. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Containing Papers of a Biological Character, 211, 179-208. www.jstor.org/stable/92087
Jarvis, Brooke (2020). Where Do Eels Come From? The New Yorker. www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
Wright, R.M., Piper, A.T., Aarestrup, K. et al. (2022) First direct evidence of adult European eels migrating to their breeding place in the Sargasso Sea. Sci Rep 12, 15362. doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-19...
Couch, C. (2022) The Utterly Engrossing Search for the Origin of Eels. Smithsonian Magazine. www.smithsonianmag.com/scienc...
Paulson, S. (2020). Eels Don’t Have Sex Until the Last Year of Their Life. Nautilus Magazine. nautil.us/eels-dont-have-sex-... 
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SpongeBob: “Escalators escalators escalators” [rolls dice 🎲]
Patrick: Eels
Buen video, se nota que es exclusivo y especializado de su especie, que bueno que no hay trolls que usen ingeniería genética para volver anguilas eléctricas a todas las anguilas del planeta Tierra, provocando evolución artificial forzada.
Saw this a week late. :/
A week after comment, to be fair the comment was 3 days before may so very short timespan lol
we havent learned more because i havent leveled up my civilization to level 2
Freud really had an obsession...
Some would say it's very... Freudian 👀
When I here’d this, I immediately thought of Sam o Nella…
WHAT'S A NI**A GOTTA DO TO GET SOME EEL DIC-
@@jellycrab
What's a [person] gotta do to get some eel-?!
He was a pervert
I feel like the importance of direct evidence to the scientific community was understated. Also understated was how this relationship of modern science being able to experimentally confirm predictions made decades earlier is very frequent. For examples, 2017 nobel prize in physics was awarded for the "discovery" of gravity waves, but Einstein had predicted their existence and their basic behavior in 1916 based on available experimental evidence. Yet the work of these modern scientists is important and worthy of our praise. Direct evidence is not only necessary to confirm the hypothesis, but gives us additional nuance that is essential for making further predictions.
Agreed. It's also one of the many reasons that photo of a black hole was so massive back in 2019. We already knew what a Black hole would look like from the math and simulations of them, but actually being able to take a photograph of one and confirm that those "on paper" discoveries were correct in practice was a huge deal.
Science is all about figuring out "How the world around us most likely works". The math and models can only get us so sure that we understand something, so the more confirmations that "that is how it works" we can get, the better.
Agreed in general! But let's hold onto that Nobel Prize for Eelology until we actually find an eel egg.
actually einstein didn't predicted well sorta of, he actually hated them and thought they shouldn't exist his model just happen to predict them as pointed by others.
once he made his model public at lead to many jumping in and toying with his model leading to many ideas like black hole which he also rejected at first.
You tell em Will
@@MinuteEarth sadly biology doesn't have a nobel prize ...
"We are still yet to find a single wild eel egg"
That's a pretty impressive lack of results.
Little do we know, the elite are laughing their assess off because they've caught eel eggs as the delicacy for themselves
You mean, " we are st eeel yet to find,right?"😂
Yup.
Freud being obsessed with eel gonads is the most Freudian thing I’ve ever heard
THESE ARE ALL GIRLS
@@BlueRGuy I remember that video
@@BlueRGuy GO GET MORE
I blame his mother.
(If you don't understand the above reference then you must be a follower of Jung)
@@boogieknee3781 if you still don't understand that, then you're too Jung zu verstehen.
Very cool! Will eels not breed in captivity at all? Has anyone tried to increase the salinity of their water over time to simulate a migration to salt water?
Yes! They think they're getting close but no luck just yet.
Sounds like basically the opposite of salmon, migrate thousands of miles to fresh water rivers to mate, and die off. Babies swim out to the ocean to live for a couple years before they make the trip to spawn. So you essentially miss the middle stages.
I wonder if this is why early fish trappers made salmon extinct in so many native streams, because they not only blocked off 100% of the river with a net, but since the salmon came back each year they prob thought it was fine to keep doing it (not realizing the salmon coming up stream were few years old). That’s prob too much credit tho lol, more likely just greed.
@@carsonhunt4642 Dang. Eel and salmon are like ying&yang!
@@MinuteEarth Wonder if they've also tried increasing pressure while reducing temperature and light. Slithering around making that far of a journey, has to be some form of direction indicator I image. Cool to think about.
They can through hormones force them to reproduce in captivity, but they have not successfully got one to reproduce through normal environmental change
You know what, for someone not to know the existence of the Americas, and the fact that eels die after giving birth and their babies come out fully formed when they reach Europe, Aristotle got a pretty reasonable conclusion
well when you put it that way....
no... he didn't
Aristotle said all sorts of idiotic stuff. He was a loud mouthed bully, that's all.
@@rickkwitkoski1976 why was he a bully?
I might be mistaken, but I think that Aristotle’s hypothesis was not only on eels. For example, he thought that rotting food would create flies.
@@noeschaeffer2167 wait.. are you saying they don't?😮
I've spent time researching this and the rabbit hole is fascinating. The fact we simply don't know some seemingly basic things we all assumed we know is mind-boggling.
Surprised you didn't mention about the attempts to breed in captivity and how much it has failed.
No it's clearly an eel hole cause it's about eels
Rabitt hole? They fuck rabbits ?
Aristotle sure had strange ideas about so many things.
He was the greatest thinker of all time a mind so powerful conjures up things beyond normal human reach
@@luisfilipe2023, surely you jest. Aristotle was an important philosopher and he gave us building blocks, but the amount of advancements made after showed up much more important thinkers. Wittgenstein, Heidegger ... Byung-Chul Han, if you want something more contemporary. Claiming Aristotle was the greatest thinker of all time is just not factually true, both considering those that came after but also those who came before.
@@luisfilipe2023 Didn't he literally say the guy who hypothesized atoms was wrong?
@@luisfilipe2023 best not to put any human on a pedestal. We're all flawed after all.
i mean there are two main factors in his weirdness of tought :
1) he was one of the first pepole making this kind of toughts , and he didn't have a lot of information we have today , as well as not being as wealthy as the avarage researcher today
2) we don't have direct documents written by him , it seems we mostly have stuff written by his students and documents written by roman and medival thinkers about aristotle ,
so yeah we mostly have summaries of his tought and thinkers writing about him ...
it's likely that some nuance got lost in the middle and in the translation , considering stuff about him got translated from anchient greek to latin and then in english ...
and we collectively forgot that it wasn't stuff written by him , but about him somewhere along the way ...
we see basically 1% of the anchient world , and it suffers from survivorship bias ...
(an old quote by Sam O'Nella questioning the need to receive eel genitalia)
WHAT'S A GOTTA DO TO GET SOME EEL DIIIII....
Was looking for this.
"THESE ARE ALL GIRLS!"
-Sam O'Nella
I did field research on American eels as an assistant a few years ago. They were honestly such interesting and clever creatures. I had a meter long one wrap itself around my arm and then sneak its tail onto my shoulder, only to suddenly use its tail on my should like a springboard and rocket out behind me into the water. Not the first last I was tricked by an eel.
Do American eels migrate to the same place as European eels to breed, or do they have another place they go to?
@@crabby7668 To be fair I was just an assistant but according to my professor at the time, yes they do also migrate to breed in the sargasso sea.
@@lillithcollins5192 thanks for that. Very interesting. I wonder if eels in other parts of the world have a similarly restricted breeding area. It is fascinating that after all these years we still don't really know what they get up to!
Whatever causes navigation failure in the Bermuda triangle probably causes spawning of eels.
It's incredible that people used to eat eels everyday at one point! This highlights how important it is to be mindful and avoid overfishing or damaging the natural environment 🎣
If only we could be more considerate in present times
@@mosesetafuna5958 Yeah, it's really important to be mindful and we can all do our part to make a difference. Fun fact - eels have been around since the dinosaurs! 🦕🦖
@@SearchOfSelfnot very impressive tbh
@@metal_pipe9764dont type out what you talk to the mirror
@@user-pv2fz6wm2g but like, eels being around since the dinosaurs isn't impressive, a lot of species have
Ahhh, Sigmund Freud and eels...
Bring backs some memories
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if I remember correctly, previously the different life stages of eels were thought of as different species and that's why no one found any small eels. Eels mainly arrive along the European coast as glass eels, not as fully developed eels. Glass eels looks quite different to adult eels, and therefore were thought of as a different species.
After glass, it becomes yellow eel and when sexually mature it turns to silver and begins it's journey back to the sargasso.
This got my attention, I was quite intrigued with this topic. Thank you for covering this subject.
I feel like this is an oversimplification of what was discovered. Yes, they knew that the saragasso sea was the breeding grounds, but didn't know how the eels got there. Also talking the size of eels seems to dismiss the fact that eels at different stages of their life cycle look considerably different. As in there are different names for the different stages. Sometimes so different that it wasn’t known that they were the same species until fairly recently.
Also eels don't reach Europe fully mature. They are still very small when they enter European river systems and then grow up there.
Didn't know how the eels got there? Are you serious? Yeah, we used to think they just flew there, but more modern theories postulated that they teleported. It was only in the 2020s that we learned that the eels SWAM there
What a fantastic way to explain how that early research was done!
Since no one has ever seen any eel eggs, it is possible to think that maybe the eels give live birth? Just a thought I had.
We haven't observed WILD eel eggs. We do know, for sure, that they release eggs, European eels have been successfully bred in captivity.
@@thorjelly Oh, seriously? Okay then
@@turkeyman100 Yes, though sadly, the larvae do not live very long in captivity, so all farmed eels are still caught at a young age from the ocean.
I think that I need to share my knowledge about what I know from the baby eels and I didn't found on the video. First of all I have to say that I am from Spain and in my country we have a long tradition will eels and most important with BABY eels (called "angulas" in Spain). I think that maybe this is the only part in the world that this happens, but it will be great if someone else could share if their culture have this food too. In the northern part of the country, on the Cantabrian sea, for many years it was so common for the fishermen to find gooey balls of baby eels very close to the dock. At that time the product was very cheap because it was like the rubbish from the sea. But then it came the japanese people and their love for adult eels and their need for them to keep rice fields free of insects, so they started to buy all the bay eels to grown them in adults (I never knew if it was true or just a lie for raising the price), but because of the increasing demand of the japanese people and also the small amount of baby eels that you can find, the price on the market for this product got crazy, to the point that it is the second most expensive fish product that you can find (after caviar). Because of this and the fact that spanish people were used to this product, a man find an amazing idea for recycle bad fish and to keep the tradition of eating this baby eels. He decided to take the fish that can't be sold (because of their size their aspect or any other reason) and make like a minced meat, then cook it and cut it on the same size and form of the baby eels. The product called "gulas" now it can be found on every supermarket on Spain, it is cheap, healthy and tasty, and the true "angulas" can still be purchased on the market at prices around 1000-1500€/kg only for those who can pay for them or for very special events. They are not amazing on taste and surprisingly very similar to the fake ones.
*THESE ARE ALL GIRLS!*
Its insane how they figured it out.....peak human ingenuity , must feel so satisfying when they eventually figured it out
It's*
So the eels are from the Bermuda Triangle… explains their electric powers 😂
Wrong eel but that's the spirit
Electric eels aren't even eels.
@@ScionStorm1 Maybe not true eels but about as much a misnomer as "bug."
Nice to hear that the Red Skull was also a renowned biologist interested in eels.
Red Skull?
@@user-ou9qd9no5n Schmidt is Red Skull in Captain America
@@authenticallysuperficial9874 ah
Putting an electronic tracker onto a single eel and tracking that single eel's entire journey IS an amazing AND original feat, not just because it confirmed Schmidt's hypothesis, but for the technological achievement.
i found baby knot eels on the wall of a drain in Hervey Bay Qld Australia they were clear and around 2 to 3 inches long and they could climb as they climbed out of the cooler we put them in
I love this channel.
I prefer Aristotle's explanation
Let's prepare our puddles
nobody is saying that there aintno freshwater puddles at the bottom of the Sargasso sea, perhaps he's right
I remember hearing about this in Den Blå Planet, where there is a documentary of the eels far journeys.
These news really got me EELATED!
Do we know if the eel gonads that develop are always the same for the any single eel, or are they more like Gethenians, sometimes developing male and other times female? Or is that one of the many things we don't yet know?
Another cool nice scientific video!! I always enjoy your, Science related videos guy's.. 👍🧑🔬
I still think spontaneous generation of eels out of puddles is the way to go. I have a few puddles outside which will form the basis of my eel farm. Everyone eats eels according to this, or would if they could. Anyone want to invest, I have an ipo on the venture this week. 😊
How many eels do you have now?
It's the Sargasso Sea, how about looking in the titular sargassum kelp masses swirling in that sea? Seems to be prime nesting material after all. Or seagrass maybe.
"Sometimes an eel is just an eel." -- Freud
The eels are spontaneously generated in the Sargasso Sea and migrate from there
Such an eelegant story.
"Sometimes the truth can be rev-eel-ed"
And I thought "eel-aborate" was bad
Well, this "eel-levated" quickly.
Oh come on, r-eely?
WHAT'S A [REDACTED] GOTTA DO TO GET SOME EEL DI-
Every 6 months or so I am remind about the abyss which is eels
Just want to quickly clarify to everyone that European eels have been bred in captivity. We do know a lot about their reproductive cycle, we just don't know their migration patterns and behavior in the wild. We've seen European eel eggs, just not wild ones. We've seen adults developing gonads, etc. Farmed eel still come from the ocean however because bred eel larvae do not live for very long.
Someone should have told Freud that sometimes an eel is just an eel! lol
You said “revealed” with a smirk and it took me quite a while to realize why 😂
Eely good video.
It reminds me of how scientific professionals often overlook lay people's direct experience since always. It took scholars forever to figure out anatomy because they were too stuffy to simply ask the butcher what parts go where. Not too long ago, I saw a headline about aquarium fish that said something like, "cichlids can recognize which eggs/fry are theirs." Yeah, no shit.
An aspect of european imperialism/cultural hegemony: imagine the knowledge lost to genocide and assimilation
Sargasso Sea, ya know, pretty cool sea, would love to see it sometime
So what did the study from all the recent headlines actually find out?
Shame we don't have the eel population we used to have in Denmark. I grew up eating smoked eel, but it's been ten years since I've had a piece.
Sigh. Me too. My dad was fishing eels and smoking them. Delicious. He died ten years ago but had to stop fishing earlier than that. I can't remember when I last had smoked eel, but it could be close to 20 years ago. I guess I could buy some (expensive as hell), but it wouldn't be quite the same.
if we've never found wild eel eggs, is there any chance they could be a species that can lay eggs in some cases but mostly does internal pregnancy? I feel like I remember reading about sharks that did something similar.
Some species of fish give live births instead of laying eggs, so it's possible. But we haven't observed a pregnant eel with baby eels inside either, or we'd know about it.
We haven't observed WILD eel eggs. We do know, for sure, that they release eggs, European Eels have been successfully bred in captivity.
It's not about discovery.
It's about confirmation and replication.
Cool thanks
Man, if anyone deserves a hovercraft, its Schmidt. Fill that thing with eels.
Did anyone else catch the "EELaborate" pun he cast upon us?
Came for the science; stayed for the puns.
You can't tell me that reveel at the end wasn't intentional
I never asked for this, But I'm glad that I have this information now.
I didn’t know Kiki worked for Minute Earth!
Did somebody say magic time traveler?
They had to chart a Schmitton of journeys!
I'd always thought elvers were baby eels, but now I'm not so sure!
There's something funny about a guy obsessing over trying to find an eel ween.
This video is so eelaborate so weel made there's so much eelmotion eelmo agrees
This video is the definition of clickbait. It provides no information whatsoever as to WHY we haven’t learned more.
we haven’t learned more because some guy figured it out a long time ago. this is impressive because eels are weird and he did it without modern tech. and if you wanna know why we haven’t found a wild eel egg yet: ocean big, eel egg small
I enjoyed eels being mysterious however
I had no clue there was even a mystery about this
As Sam o’ Nella once said: my lawyer has advised me to not finish this joke
Anyone else get the feeling that Freud's theories are just him projecting onto the world? "I'm not weird! It's totally natural! Subconsciously you are the exact same!"
You missed the chance to share the Barnacles package is like 10 times its own body length, I wonder if that's why he is called barnacle boy
1:09 does anyone know the rig type of the ship shown in the map? I originally thought it was a carrack but it has only two masts, so now I'm unsure.
Does anyone have the name of the song in the background? I know it says Nathaniel Schroeder wrote it in the description but I watched every video on his channel and I can't find it.
What the actual .... Eels are so much weirder than I thought 😂
I am a Danish scientist and that feels like such a Dane move though I can't quite say why, lol!
Let us take a moment to appreciate how the sailors readily cooperated with a scientist expecting nothing in return. Such a cooperative mindset is extremely rare today.
With some ingenuity and a boatload of dead eels, sometimes the truth can be revealed.
“Hey hey guys!”
“What is that? Is it the eel thing you were looking for”
“Yeah, it’s Eel Balls!”
The Sargasso Sea is the breeding site of European eels, but Asian eels breed east of Madagascar, Australasian eels in the Coral Sea, and Asian eels breed in the Celebes Sea.
0:49 every videogame enemies be like
Does sargassum come from the sargasso sea?
The thumbnail and title of this video has changed four times in two hours. Only for the fourth one to be the first one again.
yeah lol.. looks like someone's trying to abuse the youtube algorithm
@@trr7fd most likely. Four times in the first two hours is ridiculous.
I knew this as a child. How are newspapers so stupid
Based on experience it's because we gatekeep knowledge from our children and then laugh at them when they don't know anything.
One of the things that blow my mind is the distance in the roots,that the European Eel travels,you can find them in rivers in the Midlands in England for instance,like 90 something miles away from the cost!,,,I mean we think the salmons journey is impressive,but Eels are travelling farther in land,surely?,and even sometimes on land!
neat!
Really flying through the thumbnails on this one 😅
back in my day the sargasso was called the atlantic
bro is out here not just a/b testing thumbnails and titles, but a/b/c testing
So the fertilized eggs stay in the mother eel that dies? Would make sense to me…
That’s some crazy Schmidt..
Very odd that they'd make such a long and demanding journey through a food desert
Teho and Blixa song : millions of eels
wow
I can’t believe we finally figured out EELS
There goes the hovercraft theory. 😂
As soon as he said eel reproductive organs Sam Onella came to mind
I've heard there were so many eels in the Thames because of all the dead bodies.
So many people were murdered, suicided, or drowned in those days that they would constantly wash up under the Tower Bridge.
They even built a mortuary under the bridge to collect the bodies and tiled the walls & ceiling so they could easily clean them from bloated bodies exploding in the heat.
But what does the dead bodies have to do with eels?
@@fruity4820 Eel food
Google 'Daisy PDF' students of biology publish reports for their degree requirements often without concern for the originality of the report. There are thousands of PDF papers on Daisies and thousands of plants that only show a latin name on a Wikipedia stub article.
David has a nice reading voice. You should use him more often. Not everyone who reads for you has as good a voice to listen to...
I had to stop the video because of that chime. Couldn't tell where it was coming from at first.
Interesting that we've never found an eel egg!
Science is half proving our suspicions wrong, and half proving our suspicions right.
Okey okey you got me ;)
Do European waterways still have eels?