"Cut the line! Cut the line!"

That cry arose from the boat--from ladies in the boat, that is--when the thing that approached the gunwale was no large fish--a "real" fish, that is--but a rather large eel. The ladies wanted no slimey snake thrashing around in the boat.

Eels were exciting to land. Their long, writhing bodies provided lively pull on the line, usually suggesting some more-prized trophy. Eels were not pleasant to handle, however, and as a youngster I was inclined to cut the line, until a friend, a Dane living in Clayton, urged me to save all my eels for him. He pickled and canned them for rich winter eating. Eels are savored food elsewhere in the world, with many recipes for preparation available. Many diners enjoy the sweet, white flesh, whether jellied, smoked or in a stew by the Swedes, Dutch, or Japanese.

Where have all the eels gone? We caught them often seventy years ago. We even have "Eel Bay" to recall those days. But in 2002 the Great Lakes Fisheries Commission stated, "The American eel population is in serious decline and recruitment to the upper St. Lawrence River / Lake Ontario has now virtually ceased."

Capt. Rich Clarke agrees: "You are right I have not caught a single eel in the last 4 years. Before that I would catch them occasonally in deep water while fishing for bass. I do see them often in my boat slip at French Bay. At night they are feeding on fish the remains of fish that I have cleaned."

Capt. Allen Benas agrees that eels were much more prevalent back in the '50s, but are quite rare these days, at least for our anglers. He says "Not that we would put one of them in the boat anyway. They are slimy critters and of no value. I do laugh, however, at the fact that they are illegal to keep in both US & Canadian waters for rod & reel anglers. Trappers in Canada can keep them though. They keep them, ship them to Scandinavia, where they are processed (smoked) and then exported to NYC for consumption as the delicacy Smoked Scandinavian Eels, ending up 300 miles from where they were initially caught, where it was illegal to keep them due to contaminates."

American eel populations have declined by as much as 99% in the last 20 years due to hydropower plants, over-fishing, and other causes. Once among the most abundant species in the river, researchers measured decline of eels in the 1980s. Intensive commercial fishing of young eels in Ontario and the United States that began in the 1960s contributed to this, but scientists measure waning populations everywhere. Not only are eels now fewer, but when encountered they are generally larger, weighing some 30% more since 1994. This indicates that surviving older eels are benefiting from declining competition of younger eels.

Since 1993 decline of eels above the Moses-Saunders power dam has been precipitous. A 1998 report estimated that dams reduced potential eel habitat by 91 percent. The dams not only provided barriers to upstream migration, but on returning downstreams eels were destroyed in power turbines. A $2-million eel passage device began operation in August, 2006 at the Power Authority’s St. Lawrence-FDR Power Project. During its first year of operation, a total of 8060 eels completed the journey through the facility. With a similar number using the ladder on the Canadian portion of the Dam, the number of eels passing upstream doubled in 2006.

Back in 1997 we were warned that "the continued low recruitment suggests that the commercial fishery in the upper St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario may not be viable in another generation's time ... In addition to a loss of the fishery, there could be possible extinction of the Lake Ontario and upper St. Lawrence River stock, a species-wide decline, and local and regional ecological impacts of eliminating eels from the freshwater and marine ecosystems."

Late last year alarm spread about loss of Lake Champlain eels, becoming practically extinct there in twenty years. In Lake Ontario the eel alone once provided half the weight of all the fish harvested there. Now the eels are all but gone.

The Canadian eel counts at various locations on the St Lawrence River declined from 935,000 in 1985 to 8,000 in 1993 and to almost zero in 2001. "The decline is precipitous," says John Casselman, an eel expert and biologist at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont. "We've gone from a situation where, when the Europeans arrived, eels probably made up half of the inshore fish biomass in the upper St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario." Eels were a staple of the Native American diet, hunted with spears. Spearing of eels continued until more recent times:

Spearing Eels in Eel Bay. Howard Pyle, Scribner's Monthly,1878.

Howard Pyle, in his 1878 article, "Among the Thousand Islands," provided a vivid description of spearing eels: "In the early spring, when the shallows of Eel Bay or other sheets of water of the same kind become free of ice, the water, not being deep, becomes warm much more quickly than elsewhere, and here the half frozen fish congregate in great quantities. The professional fisherman in the bow of the boat holds a spear in shape like a trident but with an alternate sharp iron prong between each barbed shaft, the whole fixed upon a long, firm handle. Immediately upon seeing a fish, he darts this gig at him, firing the barb so effectually in his victim that to srike is to capture him. The weapon used is call a jaw-spear from its peculiar form, being a jaw-shaped piece of wood, with a sharp iron barb firmly fixed in the angle against which the eels are forced and pinned fast until they are safely landed in the boat. Eel-spearing is generally pursued at night, not only because the water is usually more quiet than during the day time, but also because the light of the blazing pine chinks in the "jack" or open brazier fixed in the bow of the skiff makes objects on the bottom more apparent by contrast with the surrounding gloom.

"It is a picturesque sight to see the swarthy forms of the fishermen, lit up in the circumscribed circle of light, looking like phantoms or demons, the one in the bow bending eagerly forward, holding the spear and watching the bottom keenly for his victim, the one in the stern silently paddling the boat across the motionless water, not a sound breaking the stillness of night but the tremuolous "ho-o-o" of the screech-owl or the crackling of pine chunks in the jack. Suddenly the figure in the prow poises himself for a moment, drives his spear forward through the water with a splash, the draws it back with the wriggling victim gleaming the in blazing light of the pine."

We may never see such a scene again.

Professor Casselman attributes to the Moses-Saunders dam near Cornwall and the Beauharnois dam near Montreal forty percent loss of migrating eels to and from here.

Rob MacGregor, Lake Ontario manager for the Ministry of Natural Resources, says, "We've probably lost seven native species in Lake Ontario. We don't want to lose an eighth if we can possibly avoid it."

The Ontario government banned commercial eel fishing in Lake Ontario and the upper St. Lawrence River in 2004, and ended the sport fishing of eels across Ontario.

In fall of 2006, Rob MacGregor managed release of 50,000 young eels into the St. Lawrence River near the Thousand Islands, a combined effort of the Natural Resources Ministry, Ontario Power Generation and the Ontario Commercial Fisheries Association. In total, these groups have restocked 144,000 eels. They will grow in Lake Ontario for 10 or 15 years, allowing the ministry to monitor their numbers. "But we don't know if they'll ever go back to the Sargasso Sea," MacGregor says.

Last June some 400,000 young eels were released from a boat into the St. Lawrence River near Mallorytown Landing, between Gananoque and Brockville. The release was overseen by the Ministry of Natural Resources, in partnership with Ontario Power Generation, which purchased the eels under an agreement with the province.

Eels have long intrigued us because of their strange life cycle. Born in the Atlantic's Sargasso Sea (in the "Bermuda Triangle"), they migrate thousands of miles to come to our waters, where they may stay ten or twenty years, then return three thousand miles to the sea to spawn. Regardless of where they come from, or how long the journey takes, all Eels reconvene at the Sargasso Sea at exactly the same time. Eels, like birds, seem to have some mysterious directional sense. Some transplanted 100 km into new waters have found their way home.

Our eels, that have swum so far inland, and so far north, are mostly female. They may grow to over four feet long, much larger than males. Also our northern eels are the oldest, and the females may produce two or three times more eggs than eels in the mid-Atlantic region. Eels are long-lived, often living some thirty years, one being reputedly over eighty years old.

Photograph courtesy Native Fish Conservancy

We should not confuse the eel with the lamprey, sometimes called the "lamprey eel." The lamprey has a prominent sucking disc filled with large, hooked teeth, several gill openings and no pectoral fins.

In 2004 a petition submitted the United State Department of the Interior requested designation the American Eel as an endangered species. In January 2008 the petition was denied, with the comment, "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 right now does not necessarily forecast an irreversible trend." Nor does the melting of the polar ice caps, eh?

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife release continued: "Overfishing and hydropower turbines continue to impact eels in some regions, such as Lake Ontario ... although these factors do not fully explain the reduced number of eels migrating up the St. Lawrence Seaway and into Lake Ontario."

As a more positive move, the eel is now an endangered species in Canada's Species at Risk registry. Queens University biologist Peter Hodson comments, "A prime suspect in the case of the missing fish is the accumulation of toxic chemicals by the parent eels as they feed, grow, and mature in polluted freshwater lakes and streams. Our task will be to determine whether female eels transfer sufficient chemicals to their offspring to cause their death before reaching Lake Ontario" Dr. Hodson heads a new international study funded by Canada's Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.