am actually obsessed w this (Patrik Svensson on the mystery of the eel, for Nautil.us)
[ID: excerpt from the article linked. A Danish scientist, Johannes Schmidt, actually cracked the mystery of where eels come from. What did he do? That’s one of my favorite stories in the science history of the eel. This was in the beginning of the 20th century, and by that point, scientists knew there were males and females and the eel was breeding like normal fish. But they still didn’t know where it happens. So Johannes Schmidt went out on the ocean with a boat to find the birthplace of the eel. His method was to catch the small larvae and measure them. The place where they were the tiniest, and therefore newly hatched, had to be the birthplace. Of course, the problem is that this eel larva is very, very small and the Atlantic Ocean is very, very big. So first he sailed from 1904 to 1911 around the shores of Europe and caught a lot of larvae, but they were quite big. So he had to go further out into the ocean, and he found out that the further west he went, they actually became smaller. But World War I broke out, so it was very dangerous to sail around the Atlantic Ocean looking for eel larvae, but he just kept on going. He actually sailed around the Atlantic for 18 years before he found the larvae that must have been newly hatched. So he could say that this place, the Sargasso Sea, was where the eel breeds. This says something about the human urge to understand nature. What makes a man sail around the Atlantic Ocean for 18 years just to know where the eel is born? There wasn’t any prestige in it. There was no money in it. It was just curiosity. He had to find out. And that’s what makes this scientific history so fascinating. It’s actually more a story about humans. /]
Story of Dinosaurs, written by David Eastman, illustrated by Joel Snyder. 1982.
[id: two pages of watercolor illustrations of ichthyosaurs, dinosaurs which look somewhat like dolphins and somewhat like fish. The second page is captioned “Otros animales extraños vivían en el mar. Algunos se parecían a los peces.” (“Other strange animals lived in the sea. Some of them looked like fish.”) /end id]
does anyone have a hack for keeping track of tense in a story? any software that will flag subject-verb disagreement across a paragraph? I have made the mistake experimental choice of using past, present, and future tense together in the same story and I might go a little insane.
Use the free trial period for ProWritingAid?
Tense Advice (or, rather, advice on using tense in writing):
