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reach 13 feet in length. Morays have canine-like snouts and large mouths with very sharp teeth. Bonus: They also have an extra set of jaws inside their throats that lunge forward to help swallow prey (just like the creature in the Alien films).
    • Conger eels have pectoral fins—the pair of fins found on the sides of fishes near the head—and big puffy “lips.” Giant Congers are the most massive eels, growing to more than 10 feet long andweighing as much as 240 pounds. If you’ve ever eaten anago at a sushi restaurant—you’ve eaten Conger eel.
    • Snipe eels can be found from about 1,300 to 13,000 feet deep, and they look like eel-birds. The upper part of their long, pointy, beaklike jaws curves upward and the lower part curves downward—like the beaks of the wading birds known as snipes.
    The first Harley-Davidson motorcycle, built in 1903, used a tomato can for a carburetor.
RIVER EELS
    There are only about 16 species of freshwater eels—but that’s deceiving. Although they’re found in lakes, rivers, and streams around the world, they’re all catadromous : They’re actually born in the oceans, spend most of their lives in freshwater, and eventually go back to the sea to spawn and die. Some standouts:
    • European eels can be found throughout Europe, from Scandinavia to Greece. They grow to about 40 inches in length, and can weigh up to 20 pounds. They have been eaten, and even farmed, for millennia: The ancient Romans kept eels in elaborate garden ponds, and some even kept them for pets.
    • American eels look similar to European eels (though females can grow to five feet long). They’re found in the eastern Americas from northern Canada to Brazil, and as far inland as the Great Lakes. They’re the only freshwater eels in the Western Hemisphere.
    • American eels were a dietary staple to many Native Americans tribes: to the Mi’kmaq people of New England and eastern Canada they were called kat , and they were prepared in many different ways—from raw to steamed to stewed—and their skins were used for making belts, decorations, and even medicine.
    • Japanese eels are found in freshwaters in Japan, Korea, and the Philippines. In the sushi world, they’re unagi .
A LONG, STRANGE EEL
    The life cycle of freshwater eels is one of the wonders of nature and ones of its ongoing mysteries. The first person known to study them: 4th century B.C. Greek scholar Aristotle. After being unable to find pregnant females carrying eggs, or witness eels mating, he concluded that eels do not procreate—they simply sprout up from “putrefying” mud. That was incorrect, of course, but it took more than 2,000 years to prove him wrong.
    The wad of cotton on the end of a Q-tip is called the bud .
    In 1896 several small, transparent, willow-leaf-shaped fish were discovered in the Mediterranean Sea. They were deemed a new fish species and named leptocephalus , meaning “small head.” Then two Italian biologists captured and raised some in aquariums, and watched—in amazement—as the leptocephali slowly turned into eels. This was the first big clue that eels, even freshwater varieties, were born in the ocean. But where?
    In 1905 Danish oceanographer Johannes Schmidt started searching the Atlantic for the smallest leptocephali he could find. The smaller they were, naturally, the closer he’d be to their place of birth. Fifteen years later, he finally narrowed it down to the Sargasso Sea—a 2,000-mile-long, warm section of the Atlantic Ocean, running roughly from Bermuda to the Azore Islands off Portugal.
EEL LIFE
    The Sargasso Sea is where all European and American eels (and many marine species, as well) go to spawn. According to scientists, it’s one of the world’s most remarkable animal migrations.
    • Eel eggs hatch somewhere in the Sargasso Sea.
    • The young leptocephali spend about a year being carried many thousands of miles by ocean currents to estuaries and river mouths all over western Europe and the