Wholesale Slippery Beast: A True Crime Natural History, with Eels

"It's part natural history, part true crime, and buckets of slippery, slimy fun. You won't be able to put it down."—The Nature Conservancy "Revelatory—and sometimes shocking... Slippery Beastbrings exhaustive research and interviews to bear on a subject of surprising richness."—Wall Street Journal Ellen Ruppel Shell's Slippery Beast is a fascinating account of a deeply mysterious creature—the eel—a thrilling saga of true crime, natural history, travel, and big business. What is it about eels? Depending on who you ask, they are a pest, a fascination, a threat, a pot of gold. What they are not is predictable. Eels emerged some 200 million years ago, weathered mass extinctions and continental shifts, and were once among the world's most abundant freshwater fish. But since the 1970s, their numbers have plummeted. Because eels—as unagi—are another thing: delicious.