I remember being fascinated by animals as a kid and the mystery of where eels went was one of the big unsolved puzzles I remember hearing about.
Much more recently I heard on QI about how medieval people, not knowing about migration, believed, through a lot of leaps, that it was ok to eat barnacle geese at lent. Worth investigating if you are curious :)
I find it very hard to believe that people in the middle ages (or before or after) looked at birds and actually thought that they really spawned from trees or barnacles. After all, birds can fly, you observe large flocks of birds in the sky right before they vanish, you know that there are warmer regions in the south, so it's not a big stretch to imagine that birds could perhaps migrate southwards. You cannot prove it, but it's a good enough guess.
I think illustrations or stories from the middle ages are to be taken as symbolic or allegorical rather than factual like a biology book would be today. They wrote down a story not because they necessarily believed it be factually true, but because it taught a different kind of truth. For example, no one has ever believed that Red Riding Hood actually happened or that you can cut open a wolf's stomach to pull out a living person.
I think that was just a way to ethically cheat the fast...In southern Germany they got around it by wrapping the meat in a dumpling (Maultaschen), so that god wouldn't notice: "The Swabian German nickname for the dish, Herrgottsbescheißerle, means "small God-cheaters""
> Much more recently I heard on QI about how medieval people, not knowing about migration, believed, through a lot of leaps, that it was ok to eat barnacle geese at lent.
There’s a similar story about how rabbits in Japanese use the classifier 羽 (-wa, “wing”) normally utilized for birds, instead of the 匹 (-hiki) you’d expect for small animals, because Buddhist monks really wanted to eat them and thus declared their ears to be wings. I don’t know how historically accurate that is. (I’m also assuming this has to come from Chinese and thus likely also has a counterpart in Korean, but can’t prove that with a cursory look through Wiktionary.)
Fascinating how certain animals have evolved with complex migration patterns to breeding grounds. And unfortunate that 95% of the population has already collapsed.
Makes me wonder what the world was like before this last great extinction.
I think it's reasonable to knock on someone for concluding a wildly incorrect theory (eg generating out of mud) even when lacking evidence pointing to the correct answer. Aristotle did this a lot. The correct position in these scenarios is one of uncertainty.
In the satellite tracking experiment, I wonder how they sexed the eels to determine they were female before tagging, given the lack of primary sex organs at that time. Are there obvious secondary characteristics like size?
> The researchers behind this recent discovery used satellite tags to follow 21 female European eels as they navigated the final phase of their incredible journey southwest from the Azores, the volcanic archipelago of the North Atlantic Ocean west of Portugal.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 34.5 ms ] threadMuch more recently I heard on QI about how medieval people, not knowing about migration, believed, through a lot of leaps, that it was ok to eat barnacle geese at lent. Worth investigating if you are curious :)
I think illustrations or stories from the middle ages are to be taken as symbolic or allegorical rather than factual like a biology book would be today. They wrote down a story not because they necessarily believed it be factually true, but because it taught a different kind of truth. For example, no one has ever believed that Red Riding Hood actually happened or that you can cut open a wolf's stomach to pull out a living person.
I think that was just a way to ethically cheat the fast...In southern Germany they got around it by wrapping the meat in a dumpling (Maultaschen), so that god wouldn't notice: "The Swabian German nickname for the dish, Herrgottsbescheißerle, means "small God-cheaters""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maultasche#History
EDIT: just remembered another similar cheat, where beavers were defined as fish, allowed to be eaten at lent.
There’s a similar story about how rabbits in Japanese use the classifier 羽 (-wa, “wing”) normally utilized for birds, instead of the 匹 (-hiki) you’d expect for small animals, because Buddhist monks really wanted to eat them and thus declared their ears to be wings. I don’t know how historically accurate that is. (I’m also assuming this has to come from Chinese and thus likely also has a counterpart in Korean, but can’t prove that with a cursory look through Wiktionary.)
Makes me wonder what the world was like before this last great extinction.
> questions remain about the timing and navigation of the eels across thousands of kilometers of open water
> The researchers behind this recent discovery used satellite tags to follow 21 female European eels as they navigated the final phase of their incredible journey southwest from the Azores, the volcanic archipelago of the North Atlantic Ocean west of Portugal.