What’s the deal with eels? – Lucy Porter, David Righton and Caroline Durif
The Infinite Monkey Cage
BBC
4.7 • 9.4K Ratings
🗓️ 26 November 2025
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Fishing rods at the ready, Brian Cox and Robin Ince attempt to reel in a creature that has baffled scientists since Aristotle: the eel. Wriggling in to help them uncover the mysteries of one of nature’s slimiest subjects are marine scientists David Righton and Caroline Durif, and comedian Lucy Porter.
How do eels navigate such vast distances so deep under water? Why has no one ever seen them reproduce? And WHY would anyone eat them jellied with pie and mash?! The panel discovers that Spanish eels are always late and that eels from all different countries are thought to meet up somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean for a huge annual orgy.
Producer: Melanie Brown Assistant Producer: Olivia Jani Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem A BBC Studios Production
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Hello, I'm Emma Barnett. For most of my career, I've been on live radio, and I love it. |
| 0:13.3 | But I've always wondered, what if we'd had more time? How much deeper does the story go? |
| 0:19.2 | I remember having this very sharp thought |
| 0:21.7 | that what you do right now, this is it. |
| 0:24.3 | This defines your life. |
| 0:26.0 | I'm ready to talk and ready to listen. |
| 0:28.3 | I'm insulted by how little the medical community is ever bothered with this. |
| 0:33.9 | Ready to talk with me, Emma Barnard, is my new podcast. |
| 0:37.0 | Listen on BBC Sounds. Welcome to |
| 0:39.3 | Infinite Monkey Cage. New episodes are released weekly wherever you get your podcasts, but... |
| 0:43.6 | If you're in the UK, you can listen to every episode a week early, first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:48.6 | Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And this is the Infinite Mustard Seed Cage. |
| 0:54.0 | The Infinite Mustard Seed mustard seed cage yep because we followed |
| 0:57.5 | exactly what you said you wanted to do this week and i was as surprised as the producer was when you said |
| 1:02.3 | you would love to do a show on the science of elves why elves are so mysterious and how you'd only |
| 1:07.0 | have a cord and eaten one elf elvah yeah elf baby eel well with that's not the |
| 1:14.4 | questions we've got for you today this is a lot more of a d and d related show i'm afraid to tell you |
| 1:21.0 | well mustard seeds a fairy not an elf yeah see you have got a little bit of knowledge there so so if we |
| 1:26.8 | just drop the roundabout legulus elrrond and Hawk the Slayer, which is a pity, because that means we won't have all the questions about Bernard Breslau. Who was an actor, younger people, you should know. Anyway, so... He's very odd, isn't he? Careful. I'm not averse to using a gull ship spell. No one here knows about the |
| 1:47.4 | goldship spell. I cannot believe totally the wrong one. I do. Do you? I don't think you can do it |
| 1:51.3 | because you'll get the verbal and semantic components required to make a water vessel fly. |
... |
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