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In addition to pondering the notions of changeability and continuity that watching a stream flow into a river tend to prompt, I was also counting and weighing glass eels, tiny transparent fish only two or three inches long that enter the tributaries of the river each spring. Which is to say, I was practicing something called citizen science, loosely defined as scientific research in which amateurs help experts gather data. Eels are tiny envoys from the realm of the inconceivable. Scientists have never been able to document their mating or birth in the North Atlantic's Sargasso Sea, nor do they know what governs their voyage to the coast's freshwaters.