And this is the truth of it: we still don’t know precisely where freshwater eels come from. For 2,500 years scholars had zero luck because eels apparently lacked reproductive organs. Aristotle tried to figure it out.  Italian scientists in the 1700s made it a point of national honor.  In the late 19th century a graduate student named Sigmund Freud grew briefly obsessed with trying to find an eel, any eel, with a pair of testes (there’s a bad joke in there somewhere). We now know eels are born in the ocean. As babies they move into rivers and stay for years before finally growing their sex and returning to the sea. After decades of additional work our best guess is that every freshwater eel is born in the Sargasso Sea, a deep, poorly explored part of the Atlantic.  And still no one has ever seen an egg, ever seen eels doing it. I understand why they keep looking, of course. Who doesn’t need more? It’s not so clinical as we like to pretend.  Think of the last lover you took.  Sure, you knew how they moved.  The same as anyone else, more or less.  But that wasn’t enough.  You needed to get closer.  You needed to see it.