Why Eels may be endangered & Norwich Fishing Report

• A month or so ago, a customer at Mike's Bait and Tackle, Voluntown, was asking if they had heard anything about declining eels and the possibility they might not be around to use for striped bass bait this year. When I called to get a fishing report for this column that week, this question message was relayed to me. At that time, I hadn't heard anything about eels being banned as a bait item, but promised to look into the matter when I had a chance. Ironically, within a few days a number of eel-related items came to my attention.
• Over the past year, there have been some news items from the DEP relating to new regulations regarding the taking of elvers, and the banning of their harvest. In fact, I assumed this was what the customer had heard about and simply confused the baby eels for the adults. Ironically, within a couple days of that phone call, I began running across a number of news items and briefs regarding eel declines, eel over harvest, and other such matters. I knew their numbers were in decline, but was not aware just how serious the matter actually is.
• It seems that over the winter, a petition was filed by the Watts Brothers to list eels as an endangered species, based on the decline in their abundance over the past few years. This triggered a series of information-gathering actions that are in the process of taking place by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Council (ASMFC) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), along with state agencies to access the status of our American eel population and to determine if protective measures need to be taken.
• The man at Mike's Tackle was right. If the status assessment finds eels in a serious enough decline to place them on the Endangered Species List as endangered or even "threatened," a process that will take a year to filter through the system, striper fishermen and tackle shops will be looking for another source of bait.
• This is a serious matter but no one needs to push the panic button quite yet. I called Dick St. Piere, a fisheries biologist from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who specializes in eel biology, to find out just what was going on and how serious this matter really is.
• Right now, it's too early to say, but the situation is a serious one that has federal and state agencies on their toes and jumping through various hoops to do the assessment work necessary to determine first, if there really is a problem and second just how bad it is.
• To fully understand the scope of these problems, it is first necessary to understand the American eel and its biology. Even scientists don't know all there is to know about this unique snake-like, catadromous fish, that has a life cycle opposite a salmon, which is an anadromous species.
• Anadromous species, such as Atlantic salmon, American shad, alewives, blueback herring, and striped bass, are all born in freshwater lakes and or rivers. The mature adults migrate in from the ocean into freshwater spawning rivers, to lay their eggs. The Eggs hatch, the fish grow and develop in freshwater for anywhere from a few months, as is the case of herring and shad, to two years in the case of an Atlantic salmon. Then, they migrate back to the ocean where they mature for varying amounts of time up to five or more years before returning to their home rivers to complete their cycle of life as spawning adults.
• American eels have a different life history. It hasn't been observed, but the adults mate at depths of more than 1,000 feet on their way to their spawning grounds in the mid Atlantic, an area that is full of the floating sargasso weed known as the Sargasso Sea, which is located about 1,000 miles east of Florida and south of Bermuda. It is here that all the eels from both North America and Europe go to spawn and die. (I don't think it is known for sure if all the adults die after spawning but it is assumed that they do.)
• It is from the Sargasso Sea, that all the young eels (elvers) from both sides of the Atlantic begin their long journey back to freshwater, where they migrate up stream ultimately taking up residence in freshwater lakes and ponds. There, they will grow and mature before heading back to the Sargasso Sea to complete their cycle. Female eels take anywhere from 5 to as much as 20 years to reach maturity, so they are a long-lived species.
• The eel eggs are buoyant. They evidently stick to or are somehow protected by the floating mats of sargasso weed where they hatch out into little critters that don't look much like the adult eels. Shortly after hatching, they move into ocean currents like the Gulf Stream and are carried northward and towards land as they move long the north Atlantic coast and across the ocean to Europe. As currents take them near land they move into rivers and streams and migrate up stream. It is not known if they go home to the birth place of their parents like salmon, but they do move up into freshwater lakes and ponds along the entire North Atlantic. The slime that is so obnoxious on an eels body allows them to move across dry land (usually during rains) to get into isolated lakes and ponds during this incredible journey.
• A couple of years ago the harvest of elvers, which reach our coastline at a length of 2-4 inches, was banned due to a huge decline in their abundance. During the peak of their slaughter these little eels were on high demand in the oriental and European markets and brought in between $400 and $500 per pound. A pound of elvers equates to about 1,000 individual baby eels and their harvest was in the hundreds of thousands of pounds annually.
• Measures were taken to end this slaughter a year or so ago, here in Connecticut and elsewhere. But who knows what kind of effect this slaughter could have had on adult populations over time? The population of adult eels has also declined seriously over the past 20 years and biologists like Dick St. Piere doesn't have an answer as to why.
• According to the National Marine Fisheries Survey, which was started in 1979, the recreational catch of adult eels has dropped from 107,000 in 1982 to a mere 11,000 in 2001. During the same time frame,commercial numbers dropped from 3.5 million pounds to 870,000. Numbers have dropped more since then, with the commercial landings in 2003 the lowest since record keeping was started in 1945.
• This is why the request was petitioned to put this species of fish on the Endangered Species list, a request that has set the wheels of an entire federal and state bureaucracy into motion. A status review is in the works which will bring together the current knowlege about the present status of eel populations throughout its range and then, from these findings, determinations will be made as to how the problem can best be handled. A status review takes about nine months to complete.
• According to Dick St. Piere, the elver harvest problem has been taken care of and the Feds don't seem to think that overharvest of the young eels is the reason for the decline in adult eels. but then again, the Feds never think commercial overharvest is a problem because they are tied too closely to politicians and the commerce department.
• Assuming the commercial fishermen aren't to blame for the decline of this species, then what is? The Watts Brothers claim it is hydro electric dams and their destruction of downstream migrating eels in their turbines. That does not really fly because, throughout the range of the species, eels have dealt with hydro dams for at least a century. Why would they suddenly decline over the last two decades? That does not make sense.
• The Europeans have been observing and working on this problem for many more years than biologists on this side of the Atlantic. At the International Eel Symposium that was held to bring this problem to public notice in 2003, a world wide decline in eels was reported. Some of the reasons put forth for this worldwide eel decline are contaminants, barriers to migration (which in this area are better not worse now than 20 years ago), turbine destruction, loss of wetlands, stream flow alterations, (a new one) parasites in the eels swim bladder and possible changes in deep ocean currents due to global warming and polar melt down.
• This latter reason is a new one European investigators are concerned about. Of the lot, the changes in ocean currents is of the most concern to me. The others are not really new and eels have dealt with most of them successfully for decades. This means something else is new or different and changes in currents could be that something. This could be very serious if it is indeed the primary cause of this decline, not only because it has many other consequences, but it is something scientists can't do a thing about.
• Researchers in Europe determined that if the eels ocean navigation angles were to change by as little as 3 degrees, due to changes in ocean current movements during the course of their travels into European rivers, the elvers could be lost at sea before they made landfall. That is a scary thought. In reality, odds are that all the above, plus overharvest contribute to the decline in eels.
• What ever the problems are, if the powers that be, believe the population of American eels is really in danger, steps will be taken to save them, the first of which would be listing them as threatened or endangered.
• Either listing would mean that at some time in the near future, perhaps a year or two down the line, after public comments and hearings, eels could dry up as a source of live bait for striper fishermen along the coast. But don't despair at this point, everything is still in the talking and figuring out stages. We will keep you posted as this situation develops and more information is brought to light.
  

Fishing Report
The miserable nor'easter that blew in on us this week has served to keep most anglers at home, hence providing little in the way of fishing reports to relay to you.

1. However, Joe Balint and Dennis from the Fish Connection ran across the Sound to fish Montauk Point last Saturday, along with a number of other anglers from this area. Where a week ago most only caught a couple fluke, this week everyone that made the run limited out on quality fluke. Joe and Dennis's catch averaged four to six pounds. Pat Abate from River1s End Tackle, Saybrook said that a couple fishermen he talked to had similar successes to relate. He said all the customers that made the Montauk run over the weekend and early in the week, before the winds became too nasty, limited out and each group seemed to have some doormats in their catch. He weighed fish up to 10 pounds since last week.
2. Striper action seems to be better in the rivers, salt ponds and inshore bays for the moment. There are some bigger fish to the west, near the New York line in Rye and also some bigger bass being reported from the Race and the Rhody shore line, but not in any great numbers at this time. With squid reported in high abundance throughout the region, expect both bass and fluke to find and feed heavily on them any time now, if they aren't already.
3. The cold weather has created excellent conditions for trout fishing, but it seems to be messing up the largemouth bass spawn, like it did last spring. All the area rivers were stocked for the last time this week.
4. Rennie Robinson said he1s been doing well at both the Yantic and Shetucket Rivers and catching fish in the 13 inch range on a regular basis.