eelsasdf.jpg

They’re motherfucking dying!

Eel populations in the River Thames have fallen by 98% in just five years, scientists have said.

The numbers of eels – which have been a traditional east London dish for centuries – fell from 1,500 in 2005 to just 50 last year.

Conservationists fear this could have a knock-on effect for other species in the river’s ecosystem.

Nobody knows what the problem is: climate change? Dams? Parasites? They are supposed to come from the Sargasso Sea (“area of mystery”!, which is my new favorite euphemism), but they’ve stopped.

The etymology for eel is also mysterious. And eel blood is poison:

Eel blood is toxic to humans and other mammals, but both cooking and the digestive process destroys the toxic protein. The toxin derived from eel blood serum was used by Charles Richet in his Nobel winning research which discovered anaphylaxis (by injecting it into dogs and observing the effect).

Now I bet you’re wondering whether there’s such a thing as eel fetish porn. There is! But I strongly encourage you not to click through unless you really, really wanna see some eels going places the good lord never intended. Because you can’t unwatch that kind of thing.

Eels! Creatures of mystery.

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....

16 replies on “What’s Up with the Motherfucking Eels?”

  1. Eels are so delicious. Maybe this is my punishment for being too grossed out to eat smoked eel as a kid, only to discover its deliciousness too late.

  2. That’s weird, because the Thames, like the Hudson, has been the subject of a pretty concentrated cleanup effort, and they’re seeing all kinds of fish in there that haven’t been seen in a century, which is good news. So this eel disappearance is not caused by good old-fashioned “water pollution” of the usual sort. Which is too bad, because water pollution is easier to fix than “I don’t know what the hell it is”.

    The answer could well lie in the Sargasso, about which surprisingly little is known (hence “mystery”). There’s a lot going on in the oceans that we know almost nothing about. And there are some very unsettling changes taking place, in terms of acidity, temperature, and mass species-disappearance, that frankly scare the shit out of me. I think we’re close to losing the oceans, which sort of means half the human population of the earth dies.

  3. At least we’ll always have the great eel scene in The Tin Drum (great in the book, decent in the movie), even when all the eels die out. The Thames is just the beginning!

    My bet is that this is related to all the estrogen-like chemicals in the water.

  5. Half the human population of the Earth, eh? Know what I’d call that? A good start. I don’t suppose we could kill the motherfucking Republicans first.

  7. This isn’t so weird. Animal populations are collapsing everywhere. I first read about certain species’ dying off en masse in the mid-90’s. Those species were usually in remote places, so folks like 5280 called it a hoax, just something those evil libruls & Al Gore were pushing.

    So now it’s appearing in places where people can’t ignore, but it’s really too late. There have been mass extinctions on earth before, quite a number of them. None of them have taken place in less than 100,000 years, let alone a few centuries. Which is what is happening right now. More species are going extinct than ever before. It is happening in far less time than it ever has happened before. But it’s all just a hoax, right 5280? So just go back to bed, there’s nothing to worry about here. Mass extinctions, extreme weather patterns, dead zones in the ocean, poisoned water tables, nope, everything’s going to be just fine.

  8. @5, or the many other drug metabolites that people piss or shit out and that pass unscathed through municipal sewage treatment (or not) and on into waterways. Then there are problems like Voltaren (anti-inflammatory) killing a large percentage of vultures on the Indian subcontinent–it had lost out in the human marketplace to Vioxx, etc., so was being injected wholesale into cattle. It just happened to be extremely toxic to vultures. Net result, a lot of animal carcasses rotting in the sun without being cleaned up by vultures.

  13. Must resist clicking on the last link…. there is a warning… oh it’s so much like checking to see if paint is really wet… it can’t be that bad…but I am being warned and you can’t unwatch… oh what to do? click aaaarrrrrrrrggggghhhh must scratch out eyes!

  15. Sweet! I’ve been looking for this eel porn video for a long time now. This was the ORIGINAL “2 girls 1 cup” back in 2005! Now, time to pwn my friends…

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