Anadromous or Catadromous?

Until this last week, when I read Patrik Svensson's Book of Eels (2019), I had never encountered either of these lovely and mysterious adjectives. I'm delighted to add "anadromous" and
"catadromous," along with their cousin "diadromous" to my vocabulary, though when I'll be able to drop any of these words into my quotidian or even hebdomadal discourse is not immediately obvious, especially inasmuch as I'm not all that confident about their accentuation. Moreover, I rarely get into heart-to-hearts about icthyic migration. 

Anadromous fishes hatch and spend their first months in freshwater streams and rivers but then they migrate to the vasty deep, where they grow and mature. When they feel ready, they return to the streams in which they were spawned to deposit and fertilize their eggs. Salmons are famously anadromous (as well as romantic and celebrated), but equally so are less-heralded smelt, herring, and shad. Eels, on the other hand, are catadromous. They are hatched deep in the ocean and then drift and wander to freshwater streams and rivers. European eels may spend, according to Svensson, as many as fifteen years in the shallows until they get the urge for going. No one knows what calls to them, but they plain have to go. Then they set out for the dangerous Sargasso Sea in the mid-Atlantic. Eel reproduction has entirely evaded the eyes of human investigators.  Nor has a single eel egg ever been identified. Eels are modest, private, discreet. No one  knows if or how eels select their mates. Do they enact elaborate courtship rituals, or do the females simply lay their putative eggs amidst a cloud of eelish milt?

Eels are not kosher, but not because they are catadromous. The rules, as set out in Leviticus, are very clear: "Everything in the waters that has fins and scales, whether in the seas or in the rivers, you may eat. But anything in the seas or the rivers that has not fins and scales is detestable to you."  Why the Lord of Hosts set His face against shrimp and clams is unknowable -- but it worked, in the sense that the religion survived and, some say, prospered for lo these three thousand years. Food taboos are a common feature of religions -- they help to separate us from them. But shouldn't taboos be minimally consistent?  If the author or authors of Leviticus had said, don't eat eels, they're slimy, ugly and tasteless to boot -- well that would be a religious prohibition I could honor. But the scales thing, I don't know, because it's now clear that eels do have scales (as well as fins). Eel scales are very small. They are embedded in the skin, and they are smothered with eel slime. They are difficult to find, but they're definitely, unquestionably present. Yet the authorities continue to deride eels as treyf and have added the distinctly unBiblical gloss that the fish's scales must be visible and detachable without harming the skin. Unjust to eels, I say. I think they deserve a retrospective pass and a full rabbinical apology.  

My reasons for not eating eels are plain and sincere: eels are hideous beasts. Even Svensson, who loves eels and eel-fishing, admits that they are loathsome to any sensible palate. 

Query: my daughter was born and lived here in her home town until she was eighteen years old. Then she left for California, where she birthed and raised her two fine children. Now she's returned home to her native streams at last. So is she catadromous or anadromous?

Comments

[Mary K. Wakeman]

Which place is saltier?

[Eve Pearlman]

i prefer to be neither

[Don Z. Block]

There is a particularly disgusting eel-eating scene in Gunter Grass' "The Tin Drum."