American Eel

American eels are the mirror image of salmon. Where salmon grow in the ocean and die in rivers, eels grow in rivers and die in the ocean. They spend 10-25 years in freshwater streams, then undergo a dramatic transformation: their eyes enlarge, their bodies turn silver, their digestive systems atrophy. They stop eating and swim thousands of miles to the Sargasso Sea - a region of the Atlantic where no eel has ever been observed spawning, despite centuries of searching. There, presumably, they spawn once and die. Their larvae drift on currents for up to a year before reaching coastal waters.

The mystery of eel reproduction fascinated Aristotle, who believed eels arose spontaneously from mud. Even today, no one has witnessed American eels mating. We know they're semelparous only from physiological evidence: the complete transformation of feeding adults into non-feeding reproductive migrants, the atrophied digestive systems, and the absence of any returning adults. Every eel that reaches the Sargasso Sea dies there.

For business, eels illustrate that the destination matters more than the origin. Salmon return home to reproduce; eels travel to die somewhere they've never been. Both strategies work. Some companies succeed by returning value to their origins - reinvesting in founding communities and core competencies. Others succeed by transforming completely and deploying resources into entirely new domains. The semelparous commitment is the constant; the direction of resource flow is the variable.