Under Water to get Out of the Rain- Trevor Norton part 2 - the Sargasso Sea

Slightly edited by me:

The Atlantic Ocean is a magnet for myths. It is the home of the Bermuda Triangle, that infamous swallower of ships to those who will swallow anything. To the south-west of the 'Bay' is the Sargasso Sea, a real place when a huge gyre of currents encircles an area the size of Greenland, trapping floating seaweed. Here, it has been said, web-footed tribes of mermen live beneath the wrack. Columbus thought he had sighted land only to become becalmed for a fortnight in a wilderness of weed, while below deck his crew discussed mutiny. It was claimed that the malicious plants 'surround the ship in such quantities as to retard its progress'. ... the floating rafts of Sargassum weed are only thirty feet across at most and couldn't possibly impede the progress of a ship coaxed forward by a breeze. And therein lies the problem; the Sargasso Sea is almost forgotten by the winds.

As often happens, the folklore obscures the true wonder of the place. It is estimated that over 10 millions tons of Sargassum drift within the gyre. Curiously, the usually fecund plants have forgotten how to become fertile. Instead, they rely on fragments breaking off and growing into independent plants identical to their parent. They are cloning themselves and therefore may live for ever. So if you are ever becalmed in the doldrums of the Sargasso Sea, lean over the side and hook up a plant - it may have been last handled by Columbus.

The freshwater eels that abound in the rivers of Europe and the eastern seaboard of America breed elsewhere. When they are eight or ten years old they change into silver livery, promptly swim down to the sea and are never seen again. In the spring, trillions of tiny juveniles appear in every estuary and swim upstream where they grow into adult eels. Where do they come from? Astonishingly, the eels breed only on the bottom of the Sargasso Sea and then die. It takes their tiny finless larvae three years to drift the 2,500 miles back to the European rivers from which their parents departed. Nobody knows why somewhere nearer to home won't do for breeding. Clearly, the Sargasso Sea must be a very special place.

The mystery is not quite solved, for no one has yet retrieved an adult eel or a fertilised egg from the bottom of the Sargasso Sea. Eels seem to hold on to their secrets. A young research student dissected over four hundred eels, but failed to locate their reproductive organs. He gave up and went off to study human psychology where evidence of sex would be much easier to find. His name was Sigmund Freud.

part 5

part4

part 3

part 1