I was curious to see what would happen if I clicked the "Unsubscribe" button at the bottom of this page, and sure enough, it told me that I unsubscribed. Neat.
Incredibly, I actually did learn this today because it was in the NYT crossword and I went down a very similar rabbit hole. I never made it to Freud, though, after I discovered and got sucked into the European Union Eel Regulation Framework[1].
If you, like me, are masochistically fascinated by this kind of “I can’t believe this is a real thing that the government actually does” documentation I recommend giving it a once-over.
I mean, in this case who else should do it? If a fish in your local waters goes from relative abundance to critically endangered, who else but the government is supposed to step in?
Only cladistically. There's a better argument that there's no such thing as a tree or crab. As far as I understand, at least the common ancestor of all fish was still a fish.
To explain: if you want to define a taxonomy in which all things that look like fish and swim are 'fish' then we are too. We are more closely related to most 'fish' than sharks are. I.e the last common ancestor of herring AND sharks is older than our & herring's LCA.
I read the blog post. Then I thought "surely the eels in my local southern German lakes can't be from the sea". But sure enough, the European eel hatches close to the Bahamas.
I audibly wtf'ed multiple times while going down this rabbit hole. Thanks!
Recommend "The Truth About Animals" by Lucy Code [0]. It has good chapter on eels. They take a left and go to the USA or take a right and go to Europe.
I have extremely strong personal feelings about how confusing Google Maps can be about something eerily similar to this. For several years up until earlier this year, I lived in apartment in Brooklyn that (along with several other apartments) was in a building that happened to be above a deli. The address of the deli was the same as our apartments, but with no apartment number. However, the entrance to get into the apartments was past the end of the deli itself due to having a small lobby area on the ground floor containing the staircase leading up to the apartments, whereas the entrance to the deli was situated very slightly around the corner that it was on, enough that the door essentially looked to be facing outward diagonally in person, but showing up as slightly on the cross street side when looking at google maps. Because the addresses were so similar, we'd sometimes get mail intended for the deli, and I have to imagine some of our stuff sometimes went there.
Frustratingly, Google Maps only considered the deli entrance to actually be the location of our building, and the visualization it gave depicted entering through the door of the deli despite there being absolutely no way to go upstairs from there (even in the areas not accessible to customers; it was fully separated from the apartments themselves). Due to an unfortunate coincidence, an apartment building slightly further around the corner from us had an address with the same number on the cross street (making up numbers here, but essentially our apartment was 123 4th Ave, and the apartment around the corner was 123 56th St). Street View did not have any address shown when viewing the actual entrance of my apartment building; as far as Google Maps was concerned, that door did not belong to any building. Quite frequently, people seemed to trust Google Maps and assume that the entrance must be on the cross street. When we ordered food for delivery, it was not at all uncommon for the delivery people to ignore the instructions I put (which got increasingly attention-grabbing over the years, ending up with several repeated lines in all caps saying "ENTRANCE IS ON <the name of the avenue>" and "DO NOT GO TO <the name of the street>") and ring the doorbell of the apartment around the corner. Once, an entire desk was even delivered outside of that apartment building around the corner (which was quite annoying due to it being quite heavy and that building being downhill from the avenue). This culminated in our neighbor literally storming into our building with the delivery person to yell at me for being an "asshole" for not being able to do anything about this (although they of course had absolutely no interest in listening to anything I had to say, let alone any ideas I had about how we might be able to work together to get this handled better once and for all).
In the aftermath of that incident, I spent a lot of time trying to find ways to get Google Maps to properly show where the entrance of our apartment was. When I tried to contact their support to get this handled, I was informed that they only supported marking a single location as the entrance for a given address, regardless of apartment number (or the lack thereof), and that my only recourse would be to get the city to give my apartment building an entirely separate address. I asked for them to just slightly move the entrance marker over to be on the same street as the entrance to my building, with the rationale that people would still have absolutely no trouble finding the entrance to the deli since they'd be looking at the corner itself and it would be plainly visible, but it would no longer mislead people into thinking that they needed to enter on the cross street, but my request was ignored. I tried giving feedback within the Maps app itself saying that the location of the entrance was incorrect and suggesting a different pin, but unsurprisingly nothing ever seemed to change.
tl;dr Please do not blindly trust Google Maps as a source of truth for ...
usual reminder that European eels[0] are close to extinction, being critically endangered, and yet, for reasons, they are still being fished and eaten all over.
The author does not appear to be aware of this but eels are not the most snake-like among fish.
Already the Ancient Greek and Roman authors had a classification of fish, where eels where less snake-like, because they have pectoral fins, while the most snake-like group of fishes consisted of morrays and lampreys, both of which have neither scales nor any kind of fins, being less similar to other fish than eels.
The loss of the legs and the elongation of the body, resulting in a snake-like form has happened not only in many groups of vertebrates, including eels and morrays, caecilian amphibians, snakes and several groups of legless lizards, but also in many worms, e.g. earthworms and leeches, which evolved from ancestors with legs. Even among mammals, weasels and their relatives have evolved towards a snake-like form, though they still have short legs.
So that cucumber and tomato salad with vinegar dressing... is a fruit salad, as 100% of its ingredients are fruit or processed fruit. (As long as you leave off the onions).
I'm surprised to learn that it is surprising that eels are fish. I mean, they live in water, they have fins, they're generally fish-shaped... What's more surprising is their incredible life cycle and reproductive journey. I'm surprised the author didn't put that in the title.
51 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 75.4 ms ] threadIf you, like me, are masochistically fascinated by this kind of “I can’t believe this is a real thing that the government actually does” documentation I recommend giving it a once-over.
1. https://oceans-and-fisheries.ec.europa.eu/ocean/marine-biodi...
[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2024/12/04/no-fish/
I mean, do reptiles exist? Fish exist.
To explain: if you want to define a taxonomy in which all things that look like fish and swim are 'fish' then we are too. We are more closely related to most 'fish' than sharks are. I.e the last common ancestor of herring AND sharks is older than our & herring's LCA.
Melanin apparently predates the split between fungus and animal kingdoms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=On2V_L9jwS4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C3lR3pczjo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElpRJQ2FZiM
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/25/where-do-eels-... ("Where Do Eels Come From?" (2020))
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23265000 (56 comments)
I audibly wtf'ed multiple times while going down this rabbit hole. Thanks!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_eel
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34211802-the-unexpected-...
The address in the footer appears to be a cafe: https://www.google.com/maps/place/389+Court+St,+Brooklyn,+NY...
Frustratingly, Google Maps only considered the deli entrance to actually be the location of our building, and the visualization it gave depicted entering through the door of the deli despite there being absolutely no way to go upstairs from there (even in the areas not accessible to customers; it was fully separated from the apartments themselves). Due to an unfortunate coincidence, an apartment building slightly further around the corner from us had an address with the same number on the cross street (making up numbers here, but essentially our apartment was 123 4th Ave, and the apartment around the corner was 123 56th St). Street View did not have any address shown when viewing the actual entrance of my apartment building; as far as Google Maps was concerned, that door did not belong to any building. Quite frequently, people seemed to trust Google Maps and assume that the entrance must be on the cross street. When we ordered food for delivery, it was not at all uncommon for the delivery people to ignore the instructions I put (which got increasingly attention-grabbing over the years, ending up with several repeated lines in all caps saying "ENTRANCE IS ON <the name of the avenue>" and "DO NOT GO TO <the name of the street>") and ring the doorbell of the apartment around the corner. Once, an entire desk was even delivered outside of that apartment building around the corner (which was quite annoying due to it being quite heavy and that building being downhill from the avenue). This culminated in our neighbor literally storming into our building with the delivery person to yell at me for being an "asshole" for not being able to do anything about this (although they of course had absolutely no interest in listening to anything I had to say, let alone any ideas I had about how we might be able to work together to get this handled better once and for all).
In the aftermath of that incident, I spent a lot of time trying to find ways to get Google Maps to properly show where the entrance of our apartment was. When I tried to contact their support to get this handled, I was informed that they only supported marking a single location as the entrance for a given address, regardless of apartment number (or the lack thereof), and that my only recourse would be to get the city to give my apartment building an entirely separate address. I asked for them to just slightly move the entrance marker over to be on the same street as the entrance to my building, with the rationale that people would still have absolutely no trouble finding the entrance to the deli since they'd be looking at the corner itself and it would be plainly visible, but it would no longer mislead people into thinking that they needed to enter on the cross street, but my request was ignored. I tried giving feedback within the Maps app itself saying that the location of the entrance was incorrect and suggesting a different pin, but unsurprisingly nothing ever seemed to change.
tl;dr Please do not blindly trust Google Maps as a source of truth for ...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_eel
Already the Ancient Greek and Roman authors had a classification of fish, where eels where less snake-like, because they have pectoral fins, while the most snake-like group of fishes consisted of morrays and lampreys, both of which have neither scales nor any kind of fins, being less similar to other fish than eels.
The loss of the legs and the elongation of the body, resulting in a snake-like form has happened not only in many groups of vertebrates, including eels and morrays, caecilian amphibians, snakes and several groups of legless lizards, but also in many worms, e.g. earthworms and leeches, which evolved from ancestors with legs. Even among mammals, weasels and their relatives have evolved towards a snake-like form, though they still have short legs.
(Fish aren't a clade at all so call em whatever you want.)
"We don't know where eels come from" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0UIJekwyPY
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/medieval-eel-rent-map-...
Eels are incredibly interesting.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=TzN148WQ2OQ
By far the catchiest song about eel mating you will encounter today.