Eels edging toward extinction in Lake Ontario

Spiel · June 13, 2009

Eels edging toward extinction in Lake Ontario

June 6, 2009

CAPE VINCENT, N.Y. - The American eel has for millennia carried out a remarkable survival saga, swimming thousands of miles of ocean to reach Lake Ontario, where it matures the swims back to its ocean birthplace to spawn and die.

But after 125 million years, the eel is struggling to run the gauntlet that humans have thrown in its way and is vanishing from the St. Lawrence River-Lake Ontario system, say New York and Canadian scientists.

Scientists estimate when the Onondaga Indians fished the lake centuries ago, there were up to 60 million eels thriving in the Lake Ontario system. As recently as the 1980s, the American eel population in Lake Ontario topped 10 million eels, according to harvest studies. Today, its numbers are in the tens of thousands _ and each year fewer and fewer eels return.

"It is commercially exploited in nearly every phase of its life," said Steve LaPan, a Lake Ontario fisheries unit leader with the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. "Add the environmental pressures introduced by humans ... In some respects, you look at this creature's life and have to ask how it hasn't gone extinct already."

When the Onondagas fished the lake, eels made up as much as 40 percent of the fish biomass in Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River and functioned as a control in the ecosystem. Scientists believe, for instance, the eels would have acted as a predatory buffer against the introduction of the round goby, an invasive species from the Black and Caspian Sea areas of Eastern Europe that has interfered in the food chain and reduced the Great Lakes' sport fisheries since first appearing in the early 1990s.

"This fish integrates all the stresses we place on our freshwater environments," said Dr. John Casselman, a biologist at Queens University in Kingston and a former senior aquatics scientist with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources. "The Lake Ontario stock is the proverbial canary for the species."

The Great Lakes Fishery Commission issued a statement of concern in 2002 about what it regarded as a "serious" decline in the American eel population. In 2003, eel biologists from 18 countries meeting in Quebec issued a similar declaration. The Canadian government identifed the American eel as a species at risk in 2006.

But the U.S. government doesn't yet consider it a species-wide problem. In January 2007, after a five-year review, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service determined that while the American eel was declining in some locations, it did not warrant protection as an endangered species, said Heather Bell, a FWS biologist.

"The eel population as a whole shows significant resiliency. If we look at eels over time, we see fluctuations in the population numbers, so a decreasing number of eels in one spot right now does not necessarily forecast an irreversible trend for the entire species," Bell said.

Most Americans think of the eel with squeamish disdain _ and frequently confuse it with the sea lamprey, an invasive parasite that nearly devastated the Great Lakes' salmon and trout fisheries. Mostly, it is regarded as a bait fish in the United States, where the annual eel harvest of 330 metric tons is valued at about $2.7 million.

But in Asia and Europe, eel is a culinary treasure and eaten in a variety of ways _ cooked, barbecued, smoked, stewed, and jellied. The Japanese alone eat more than 99,000 tons of eels a year _ the majority commercially raised in the United Kingdom, the Scandanavian countries, France, Morocco, Australia, China, Taiwan and Japan _ accounting for about 70 percent to 80 percent of global consumption.

As recently as 2000, the U.S. exported nearly $8 million worth of eels, primarily to Belgium and South Korea, according to the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center. About 80 percent of the U.S. eel harvest is now taken in the mid-Atlantic states, but there, too, scientists have witnessed populations shrink by more than 50 percent over the last 20 years.

All American eels are born in a massive area in the Bermuda Triangle known as the Sargasso Sea, spawning in the free-floating seaweed called sargassum that gives the sea its name. In recent years, people have started commercially harvesting sargassum for tea and use as an herbal remedy, shrinking the eels' nursery and leaving their eggs vulnerable.

The larvae that do emerge float on the ocean currents up the East Coast into the Gulf of the St. Lawrence, off the coasts of New Brunswick and Quebec, taking several years to complete the journey. The transparent eels are just a few inches long at this stage but can sell for over $100 a pound.

"Right away, these animals are in high demand," said LaPan. In it's later stages, eels sell for just a few dollars a pound.

At about 7 to 9 years old, the eels begin pushing up the St. Lawrence. For reasons scientists have yet to unravel, only females make the 750-mile journey up the river to Lake Ontario, the easternmost of the Great Lakes.

Moving upriver, the eels use the seaway locks and special steps to get through or over the series of giant hydroelectric power dams that have been built by Canada and the United States at Beauharnois, Quebec, and Massena, N.Y.

When the females are about 20 years old _ and have reached about 3 1/2 feet long and over 8 pounds _ they begin their migration back to the Sargasso Sea.

But the ladders they used to get by the dams are only for moving upriver, so traveling back the eels must pass through the dams' man-sized turbine blades, where about 25 percent are killed at Massena and another 25 percent at Beauharnois. Eels that survive the turbines face one last danger as they pass through the St. Lawrence tidal basin, where fishermen use weirs, or fenced enclosures, to trap eels in the tidal flats, taking another 20 percent.

"So this animal has a lot of strikes going against it _ and it's not a furry, cuddly creature that embraces people's passion," LaPan said.

Casselman added that the Lake Ontario population is key to the eel's overall survival because it accounts for as much as 60 percent of spawning females in the Sargasso. Additionally, Lake Ontario's older, larger females produce the most eggs, up to 30 million, he said.

Despite the grim outlook, it has been difficult to develop a management strategy across more than two dozen jurisdictions, including two countries, two provinces and 15 states along the Eastern seaboard from Maine to Florida.

"We can't convince all the jurisdictions that there is a problem," LaPan said.

New York is presently working with provincial governments in Ontario and Quebec to develop a recovery strategy. Ontario suspended eel harvesting in 2004; New York closed its fishery in 1982 because of excessive PCB levels in the eels.

Meanwhile, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which regulates the nation's shores up to three miles out, is conducting its own assessment.

"We have less data in other parts of the range," said commission biologist Kate Taylor. "That was one of the reasons FWS decided not to list the eel."

The commission requires all states to monitor eel populations and submit yearly reports and is pursuing a comprehensive management plan, Taylor said.

"Conservation efforts within a river, a state, even a country, will not be enough ... to be worthwhile, any effort has to be species-wide," Taylor said.