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American eel. Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
The American eel certainly gets around. It can travel from the western Atlantic Ocean to Lake Ontario. And after hanging out in the Great Lakes for a while, it turns around and heads back out to sea. Unfortunately for the eel, though, the number that make the journey has plummeted. Its population has dropped by as much as 99 percent over the last few decades.
The American eel spawns in the warm waters of the Sargasso Sea — a broad region of the Atlantic off the southeastern coast of the United States. The larvae then travel with the currents for about a year, eventually ending up anywhere from Venezuela to Greenland.
In the U.S., they spend some time in bays and estuaries all along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, then most of them move into rivers and freshwater lakes. Many of them spend several years following the Saint Lawrence River into Lake Champlain and Lake Ontario. They live there for anywhere from a few years to a few decades. When they reach sexual maturity, they swim back downstream and return to the Sargasso Sea to spawn and die.
But that journey is getting harder, mainly because of dams along the rivers. The dams prevent the eels from making it into the lakes. And many of the eels that do make it are chopped up by the turbines in power-generating dams when they head back out to spawn.
The United States and Canada are both considering whether to place the eels on the endangered species list. Even if they do, though, it’s likely to take decades for this wide-ranging fish to rebound.
