Come listen as I tell about the eel

And secrets that they stubbornly conceal

We’ve been to the moon so far away

Untangled the strands of DNA

But still our smartest minds cannot reveal

Aristotle studied and decreed

That eels are peculiar fish indeed

They have no eggs and do not mate

From mud and earth they generate

And everyone for centuries agreed

The middle ages, many theories hatch

They come from dewdrops, they come from thatch

There are no males and no females

They start as hair from horses’ tails

How can it be? Everybody wails

1700, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek ("von LAY-ven-hook")

That pioneer of the microscope did take a look

Saw babies in a bigger one

Eureka! Eels have live young

But actually they were only some worms

Biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani

Asked eel fishers if they'd seen a mommy … eel

150 million caught

Were any pregnant? They were not

Well if they have no eggs you got to tell me

1876, Sigmund Freud

One summer during college was employed

To find the testes of the eel

He cut up hundreds, big ordeal

And finding none could only squeal, annoyed,

1890, Giovanni Grassi

Counted teeny vertebrae until at last he … said …

These glassy bug-eyed willow leaves

That everyone thought were their own species

Are eel babies … well hooray but please

1921, Johannes Schmidt

Spent 20 years at sea and never quit

Searching in his trawler

For babies ever smaller

At last he knew the Sargasso Sea was it!

And now high tech we watch as they migrate

But the ones we tag all die before they mate

Finally one was swimming rapidly

Straight for the Sargasso Sea

But then the tag fell off, so we wait … still asking

And still no one has seen an eel spawn

At all our efforts mother nature yawns

But every year they're less not more

Endangered now on sea and shore

To help we must find out before they’re gone