ROBERT: And Lucy says this question: where do eels come from? LUCY COOKE: It's taken a very, very, very long time to try and figure out the mysteries of the eel. JAD: Wait, how can it be - how can it - how can that be that - how can that be true? For such an important animal, it's remarkable it has kept the secret of its origins from every human being. People have been fishing them and eating them and hunting them and studying them, as you're about to find out, forever and ever and ever. Because there has been and there still is a very simple question we've been asking about eels, and that is: where do they come from? It's got an international gonads championship. It's even got Naz - it's got Freud, it's got Nazis. LUCY COOKE: Those Nazis have got a lot to answer for. And she lived four more years on her own, and could have lived a lot longer if the Nazis hadn't invaded Paris and inadvertently cut off her supply of worms and she died. And then three months later, after what a local journalist reported as, "daily scenes of cannibalism," there was one champion that was left and it was a female - whoo-hoo! - measuring a foot in length. And so the 71 survivors a year later were three times as long as they were before. ROBERT: Because they all got sick and died, or what? But even so, after a year of the 1,000 elvers there were only 71 left. So basically in the 1930s, there are a couple of researchers in Paris who placed a thousand elvers which are young eels, they're about three inches long in a tank of water. ROBERT: Which, Lucy explained, was proven rather graphically in a famous 1930s experiment in France. LUCY COOKE: But had I managed to get eels to join my - my happy pond party, I would have been a little bit horrified because I now know they would have eaten all the other guests, because they are voracious predators and they will eat any other creature that they can get their mouths around including each other. They would just slither out of my hands and then shoot off in the grass, more like a snake than a fish out of water. I caught them, but then trying to grab them with my own bare hands was always a complete disaster because they are, as you say, extremely slippery.
I wanted all animals to be represented in my pond. No, I wanted to, because I wanted to have all animals, much like Noah. ROBERT: No, I would never even think to try to catch them because they're ucky and slimy and they remind me of snakes. But eels became my holy grail, because the thing about eels - I don't know Robert, have you ever tried to catch one? You know, pond skaters and newts and frogs, and - and I'd bring them back to my - my tub. He made me a net to catch things with out of a pair of old net curtains that I'd sort of trawl through the ditches of Romney Marsh and catch all these wonderful creatures. "Can we go to the ditches of Romney Marsh? Please, Dad!" And he'd sort of take me off and we'd go.
It became my - it was - it was - it was everything to me. And I'd sort of disappear into this watery kingdom and, you know, was obsessed with creating the perfect pond ecosystem out of this rather sterile tub for human ablution. LUCY COOKE: Oh, I was a very geeky only child, and what I loved to do more than anything else in the world was, my father sunk an old Victorian bath into the garden and that became my Narnia. ROBERT: You could just start with, like, tell me when you first - you know, first encountered this creature. LUCY COOKE: Yeah, are you ready to rock and roll? ROBERT: Because as you will soon learn, the story of the eel is really - and this is strange to think about - the limits of human knowledge. LUCY COOKE: Oh my God, and the eel's so good. ROBERT: Because we only have 33 minutes left, and I don't want to. ROBERT: Well, I'm gonna stop right there and switch quickly to eels. ROBERT: But what I really wanted to talk to Lucy about. LUCY COOKE: What you're really looking for in a male panda is one that can squirt his pee quite high up a tree. LUCY COOKE: The island of dwarf stone sloths in Panama. And so I called her up, and we just started talking about. ROBERT: So Lucy - so Lucy wrote a book, and the book is actually a collection of animal profiles which come from her journalism. ROBERT: It's really - like, we're, like, feasting on this book. LUCY COOKE: Which is filled with strange stories. LUCY COOKE: I'm the author of The Truth About Animals. ROBERT: And the mystery comes from this woman, Lucy Cooke. ROBERT: And today I've brought us a little - a little story. Go ahead and start me and I'll just go - I'll just take it through. Would you like to - would you like to do it?