How eels themselves have sex has been the subject of great curiosity. No one ever saw them mating. Aristotle concluded that they spontaneously arose from mud. A Greek naturalist society in the second century AD decided that eel sex must involve a lot of rubbing, and that mucous must be the eels' sexual fluid. Sigmund Freud's first assignment in medical school was to discover where eels hid their testicles. He couldn't find them.
In the 1890s, European scientists came closer to solving the mystery of eel sex by studginy 'glass eels.' Glass eels are miniature, oceangoing eels. They are transparent and look like little shard of glass. The scientists discovered that glass eels are actually just baby freshwater eels. Mysteriously, the glass eels all seemed to be swimming toward Europe from some distant point in the sea.
An obsessed Danish biologist named Johannes Schmidt launched expedition after expedition, sailing deeper into the Atlantic on each journey. The glass eels he caught were smaller and younger the farther he went. In 1922, after eighteen years, he finally discovered where they were all coming from: the Bermuda Triangle.
As far as scientists can tell, all American and European freshwater eels are born in or near the seaweed-filled Sargasso Sea, in the Bermuda Triangle. After hatching, the baby eels leave the Sargasso and start swimming. They don't stop until they reach their destination. That desintation could be a river in Iowa or a river in Germany. The journey to Europe can take a glass eel two or three years to complete. Relative to body size, it's the equivalent of a human swimming to the moon.
Asian eels do the same thing, except in the Pacific. They're all born at one place in the Philippine Sea, and from there they journey to rivers all over Asia.
Adult eels live in their freshwaer homes for eight to ten years, some much longer. They eat until their bodies contain nearly 30 percent fat, and toward the end of their lives they slither back to the sea to mate.
As they leave freshwater, their digestive systems dissolve and disappear. They will never eat again. Like salmon, they survive by digesting their own fat, and after that, their own muscle protein. Scientists assume that they return to the Sargasso and Philippine seas to mate, but to this day no one has witnessed eels spawning, and no one knows how they travel so far without food. In human terms, it's like having just one chance at sex before you die, but you have to swim from the moon to earth - without stopping to eat - to get it. No wonder the Japanese consider eels an aphrodisiac.
[from The Zen of Fish ]
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