Song of the American eel
(Sun photo by Jed Kirshbaum)
Here is a transcript of my most recent "Environment in Focus" radio program, which aired this morning on WYPR 88.1 FM in Baltimore. To listen, click here.
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Irving Chappelear is a Chesapeake Bay eelman. His father taught him a long time ago that April when masses of eels swarm past their dock in Southern Maryland. That’s when it’s time to set the traps.
Irving Chappelear (photo by Jed Kirschbaum)
So on a drizzly, cold morning, Irving sets off in a motorboat across the lead gray Patuxent River. He grips the wheel with his left hand, while with his right he swings a steel hook on a long pole. He snags a buoy, and hauls up the line until a wire basket breaks the surface. Inside the trap, three finger-sized green eels shimmer with slime. He can sell these little ones as crab bait for about a buck and a quarter a pound. He can get twice as much for big eels, which are sold as delicacies to restaurants in Asia and Europe.
But Irving’s next two traps are empty. And as rain started to fall, he throws the empty traps back into the river and wondereds: Where have all the eels gone?
American eels are mysterious creatures. And the reasons for their disappearance around the world are as slippery and elusive as they are.
American eel. (Sun photo by Doug Kapustin)
Although no one’s ever seen it, all the American and European eels are believed to spawn in a single place, deep in the Atlantic Ocean under thick rafts of seaweed that form the Sargasso Sea. The larvae grow into transparent leaf-like creatures that are carried by the gulf stream to the coasts. As the glass eels drift toward shore, they change colors -- from yellow, to green, to black. They spend most of their lives far inland, in ponds and creeks, lurking under rocks during the day and hunting for bugs at night. After about eight years, the adult eels are ready to reproduce. Their eyes bulge to twice the normal size and their skin turns silver. Driven by lust, they thrash thousands of miles back downstream to the spot in the ocean where they were born -- without eating the whole trip. Instead, they digest their own stomachs for energy. At the end of their epic journey, amid the seaweed and rotting shipwrecks in the Sargasso Sea, they release millions of eggs and die -- their death creating new life.
Because their life cycle is so dependent on ocean currents, one theory is that eels are declining because global warming is slowing their conveyor belt. Disruption of weather patterns could explain why eels have virtually disappeared from Canada and Europe, but not yet the Chesapeake Bay, which is closer to the Sargasso Sea. But scientists say there are other factors, too -- large dams blocking streams, overfishing, industrial pollutants called PCB's and Japanese parasites that are boring tiny holes in the swim bladders of American eels.
(Sun photo by Jerry Jackson)
After hauling up 40 traps, Irving Chappelear has a few dozen eels. Enough to pay for his fuel -- but not enough to make a living.
The eels wrestle in a barrel, their slime-slathered bodies making sucking, squeaking sounds -- as if singing in a strange tongue. It’s a song that’s fading on the Chesapeake Bay.
Comments
Is this really happening?
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Posted by: james | May 5, 2008 10:58 AM