Eel faces ill future

[Spiel]

Eel faces ill future

 

 

February 22nd, 2010

Ian Elliot / The Whig-Standard

 

 

John Casselman says the American eel has

been caught in a perfect storm of Extinction.

Ian Elliot / The Whig-Standard

 

 

The lowly American eel may not be the cuddliest of creatures, but it is an important indicator species when it comes to the overall health of the Great Lakes.

 

The bad news is that it has all but disappeared.

 

The American eel — which is entirely different from the lamprey eel, which is an imported parasite and an unwelcome predator — has been evolutionarily unchanged for 125 million years.

 

It was one of the most important and heavily fished species in the Great Lakes this side of Niagara Falls for thousands of years.

Starting in the mid-1980s they began to disappear and now barely exist here.

 

John Casselman, an adjunct biology professor at Queen’s University, says the eels have been caught in a perfect storm of extinction, their numbers wiped out by everything from habitat loss to disease to overfishing — even to global warming that is altering oceanic currents where they spend their first years.

 

“If you take Oneida Lake, which is one of the Finger Lakes in New York State, in 1916 they were catching 100 tons of eels out of that one little lake,” he said yesterday at the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes as he kicked off a monthly environmental lecture series that will be held there.

 

“There have been exactly two eels caught there in the last 25 years.”

 

A prized catch of the Iroquois who lived in this part of North America, the eels were abundant, relatively easy to catch in volume and were fatty: they contain six times as much energy, ounce for ounce, as any other freshwater fish.

 

“The eels were every bit as important to the Iroquois as salmon were (to native people) on the West Coast” he said.

 

“They could take just a small piece of eel and that would sustain them when they were hunting in the bush. It was their Powerbar, really.”

 

Historical records talk about the incredible abundance of eels in the Great Lakes and how they were captured first by the native people and then by white commercial fishermen.

 

While prized in sushi — another factor that has led to their overfishing — in the 1950s they were still so abundant that they were worth 10 cents a pound and ground up for chicken feed.

 

Now their numbers are so low that they have become a delicacy when smoked and cost more than good Parmesan cheese — $45 a kilogram or more.

 

Casselman admits that they aren’t a sexy species like a fat salmon, but says they are intricately connected with life in this part of Canada and are now almost lost.

 

“I really hope that we aren’t at the stage where the only place we can learn about our long association with the eel is in museums and archives, but I am afraid we are almost there.”

 

Eels are unusual as they spawn in salt water near Bermuda, then spend five years slowly drifting north in the Atlantic until they come to a fresh-water outlet such as the mouth of the St. Lawrence.

 

They live the rest of their lives in fresh water, where they can spend 20 years or more before heading back to the Atlantic to spawn and die, as their offspring repeat that cycle.

 

Dams along the St. Lawrence have blocked them from going to and returning from spawning grounds, and hydroelectric dams chop as many as 40% of spawning eels to pieces in their turbines.

 

“You hear a lot about green energy,” he observed dryly of the hydroelectric dams.

 

“It’s not green energy as far as the eels are concerned.”

 

They have also fallen victim to the loss of wetlands, the arrival of zebra mussels that clarified the water and made it more difficult for them to hide, pollutants such as dioxins that the fatty eels absorb, and the loss of food species such as the alewife.

 

The commercial harvest of eel ended in the Great Lakes in 2004 and Casselman warns the population continues to drop, to the point that the eels are in danger of disappearing entirely from the lakes.

 

Before it does, he is urging both the U.S. and Canadian governments to draw up a plan to reduce the species’ mortality by adding more eel ladders around dams, increasing eel habitat and monitoring more thoroughly eel mortality and young eel numbers to reverse the dramatic plunge in the eel population.

 

“Eels are on the edge,” he told the crowd at the Marine Museum.

 

“Unfortunately, the problems they face encapsulate all the issues we’re dealing with in fresh water species.”