Thursday Sep 26, 2024
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY
11201
About the Book.
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.
About the Author.
Prize winning journalist Ellen Ruppel Shell has contributed to scores of publications including The Smithsonian, Scientific American, Science, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Professor Emeritus of science journalism at Boston University, she was a longtime contributing editor and correspondent to the Atlantic, and the author of four previous books, including Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture.
About the Moderators.
Carl Zimmer writes the “Origins” column at the New York Times, where he has been contributing articles about science since 2004. He is the author of 15 books, including Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, to be published in February 2025. Zimmer’s work has appeared in a number of magazines, including The Atlantic, Wired, National Geographic, and Time. Zimmer teaches writing at Yale, where he is professor adjunct in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry.
Robin Marantz Henig is a science journalist who has written scores of longform magazine articles as well as nine books, including “Pandora’s Baby,” about the early days of IVF research; “The Monk in the Garden,” about Gregor Mendel and the discovery of genetics; and “A Dancing Matrix,” about how new pandemic viruses emerge. She lives in New York City, where she teaches in the Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) at New York University.