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By Douglas Main
Senior writer
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Eels used to be widespread throughout the eastern coast of North America, stretching from Greenland as far south as Brazil. They were so plentiful that early explorers wrote of Native Americans like the Mi'kmaq easily reaching into streams and pulling them out with their bare hands.
But now, eel populations have greatly declined. In some areas such as parts of New England, where they were once so plentiful they could be seen forming solid masses over the top of rivers during spring migrations, they can no longer be found. They've also lost 80 percent of their habitat, due to the creation of dams and waterfront development, according to the Center for Environmental Science, Accuracy & Reliability, a conservation group based in Fresno, California.
The center has petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to list the eels as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, which would greatly increase the legal protections afforded them. The eel is listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
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The federal government has been considering the status of the American eel since 2011, but FWS spokesman Steven Shepard tells the Associated Press the agency will likely make a decision on the fish's listing by the end of September.
The decision looms as prices for juvenile eels, known as elvers, have jumped to $2,100 per pound in 2015, after being worth less than $100 per pound in 2009, according to the AP. This increase in price is driven in part by the decline of the European eel, populations of which are down by more than 99 percent over the past few decades. Elvers are harvested in Maine and South Carolina, the only two states that have significant fisheries, and sold to Japan to be raised to adulthood. Adult eels are prized for their use in sushi.
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Like their European cousins, American eels are catadromous, meaning they are born in the sea but migrate into freshwater to grow into adults. American eels are born in the Sargasso Sea, an oval-shaped expanse of weedy, flotsam-ridden waters in the middle of the Atlantic, about which researchers know very little. After growing up in streams and rivers, adult eels return to the Sargasso Sea to mate. Then they lay eggs that float into the ocean depths. Females may lay 10 million to 20 million eggs in a single season.
The eggs are fertilized externally, and the young hatch and feed on marine "snow," bits of dead plankton and other debris that fall to the seafloor. They soon set off and begin floating westward, little transparent-bodied pioneers, arriving somewhere off the East Coast about four to seven months later.
Soon they become glass eels, which look more like the adults but are still transparent. Once they've reached their destination, they swim up streams and begin to turn a yellowish color, at which point they're known as elvers. In streams and rivers, they hide in mud or sediment during the day, and at night hunt out crustaceans or insects. Then if all goes right, they grow to adulthood over the course of about 10 to 20 years and eventually return to the sea from whence they came, to start the cycle anew.
The eels are under threat due to habitat disruption by dams, pollution, invasive species, disease and inscrutable oceanic changes linked to climate change. Dams are a particularly troublesome obstacle to eels, preventing them from making their way into streams.
There is some good news, though: When dams are removed, eel populations can rapidly rebound. A study published in 2012 found that just two years after the 2004 removal of the Embrey Dam on the Rappahannock River in Virginia, eel numbers greatly increased by as much as 150 percent, up to 100 miles up the river.
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