April 17, 2013 — Hard science takes a backseat to poetic meditation on the known and unknowable on the "Nature" (8 p.m. on WGBH) presentation of "The Mystery of Eels." The documentary is narrated by artist and author James Prosek ("Trout: An Illustrated History"), whose fascination with eels grew after visiting Ray Turner, the proprietor of Delaware Delicacies near Hancock, N.Y.
Turner keeps an eel weir, an ancient device for trapping the snakelike fish. Weirs consist of two stone walls that form a V in the river. A wooden box located at the point of the V catches eels as they migrate back down the river on the way to the Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic.
While Turner and the other weir keepers employ a "technology" at least hundreds of years old, the market for eels is as fluid and lucrative as today's stock market. Eels, considered a delicacy in Asia, are big business. Recently, Chinese companies have developed facilities where young fish known as "glass eels" are raised to adulthood. Prosek visits fishermen and women in Maine, where catching glass eels for the Chinese has made some millionaires.
In Japan, Prosek meets with scientists spending millions on ways to breed eels artificially. So far, it has been in vain. Few know exactly where eels do their spawning, or why they swim inland to fresh water rivers only to return to the sea as adults. Their mysterious nature has made eels figures of legend and worship among New Zealand's Maori tribe members.
Prosek draws parallels between the mystical traditions of the Maori and Turner, the eel man he met near New York's Catskill Mountains. Both put eels in particular and nature in general at the center of their lives and their culture.
Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times