Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Slippery Beast: A True Crime Natural History, with Eels

Slippery Beast: A True Crime Natural History, with Eels

Shell, Ellen Ruppel

Hardcover

AgricultureEnvironmental StudiesMarine Life

Publisher Price: $28.00

ISBN10: 141976585X
ISBN13: 9781419765858
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Published: Aug 6 2024
Pages: 304
Weight: 0.92
Height: 1.03 Width: 5.85 Depth: 8.48
Language: English
It's part natural history, part true crime, and buckets of slippery, slimy fun. You won't be able to put it down.--The Nature Conservancy

Revelatory--and sometimes shocking... Slippery Beast brings exhaustive research and interviews to bear on a subject of surprising richness.--Wall Street Journal

Ellen Ruppel Shell's Slippery Beast is a fascinating account of a deeply mysterious creature--the eel--a thrilling saga of true crime, natural history, travel, and big business.

What is it about eels? Depending on who you ask, they are a pest, a fascination, a threat, a pot of gold. What they are not is predictable. Eels emerged some 200 million years ago, weathered mass extinctions and continental shifts, and were once among the world's most abundant freshwater fish. But since the 1970s, their numbers have plummeted. Because eels--as unagi--are another thing: delicious.

In Slippery Beast, journalist Ellen Ruppel Shell travels in the world of eel people, pursuing a burgeoning fascination with this mysterious and highly coveted creature. Despite centuries of study by celebrated thinkers from Aristotle to Leeuwenhoek to a young Sigmund Freud, much about eels remains unknown, including exactly how eels beget other eels. Eels cannot be bred reliably in captivity, and as a result, infant eels are unbelievably valuable. A pound of the tiny, translucent, bug-eyed elvers caught in the cold fresh waters of Maine can command $3,000 or more on the black market. Illegal trade in eels is an international scandal measured in billions of dollars every year. In Maine, federal investigators have risked their lives to bust poaching rings, including the notorious half-decade-long Operation Broken Glass.

Ruppel Shell follows the elusive eel from Maine to the Sargasso Sea and back, stalking riversides, fishing holes, laboratories, restaurants, courtrooms, and America's first commercial eel family farm, which just might upend the international market and save a state. This is an enthralling, globe-spanning look at an animal that you may never come to love, but which will never fail to astonish you, a miraculous creature that tells more about us than we can ever know about it.

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