EELS of all things!

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:03][music] [music] >> So, he just came here from the Sargasso Sea.

[00:00:28]Wow.

[00:00:30]So, like this little thing came or the mother came?

[00:00:34]>> off as a larva [music] and drifted halfway here and then it metamorphosed into this little eel and swam here.

[00:00:48]Eels really every animal is remarkable.

[00:00:51]Eels certainly have that title. They're catadromous, which means they're born in the ocean and they move to fresh water to live the rest of their lives. It's about a 2,000 mile migration from the Sargasso Sea.

[00:01:10]They're the only catadromous fish in North America. So, they're quite uncommon, yet they occupy more habitats than any fish in North America. They're very flexible as to where they can live [music] and they can attain a very large size to carry lots of eggs as females so they can have that one migration from fresh water habitat, say New England, out to the Sargasso Sea to spawn once before they die.

[00:01:34]So, my role with eels is working for the state division of marine fisheries is to record information to help us understand the status of the populations and information that will help us manage this natural resource. [music] So, I've been working with eels for at least 30 years in that role. I got into it to a point where um the state issued freshwater eel licenses where you could pot in fresh water.

[00:02:00]And you could go anywhere in the state.

[00:02:03]So, I was fortunate enough to get one of those licenses. It was like a lottery or something. And I wow, I got a license.

[00:02:09][music] So, I I would fish all over Cape Cod and uh I would use herring for bait. You know, I I don't mind telling me tell you the old secrets cuz it's a fishery that's go- long gone. You know, there's so many cormorants and seals now, they pretty much have wiped out the resource.

[00:02:36]I probably stopped 10 years ago.

[00:02:39]Uh cuz it's just they aren't there. You know, you go you I'd go out to a I'd I'd pot September and October and you'd go to eelgrass beds.

[00:02:48]And now you go out there and there's 600 cormorants, you know, diving. And I I remember one time Jay and I were long raking, uh my brother Jay and I were long raking in Town Cove. And there was one winter where we were waiting for the ice to leave so we could go back out. So, finally the ice left and I remember raking one day oh, good good good to be back out and and I watched one cormorant dive in front of me and I watched [music] I watched this is in I don't know.

[00:03:23]Probably after this is in January, say.

[00:03:26]>> [panting] >> Uh cormorant would dive and come up with an eel and then yeah, they they bring it up above the shore above the waterline and gobble it down. You could see him gobble it down.

[00:03:40]The same cormorant would dive come up again with another eel and they were they it was just a range of eels. They were small, you know, like 10 12 inch eels.

[00:03:50]>> [music] >> He di- dove seven times in a row and had success. Seven eels in a row. And then I saw him dive the eighth time and he came up and no.

[00:04:01]But that told me plenty about where the eels were going.

[00:04:07]In terms of what might be holding back the recovery of eels, it's interesting.

[00:04:11]Natural predation [music] is certainly part of the equation.

[00:04:14]If you look at river herring, similar declines, but there's been modest improvements. I we've seen some of those populations improve. We're not seeing that with eel. It's a great concern of mine. What they need though is to occupy the bottom of our ponds and estuaries where we've seen a lot of degradation due to excessive nutrient loading because we all use, you know, in the ground septic systems.

[00:04:37]So, we really need to reduce our nutrients to improve those habitats. So, if they're forced to live in smaller small spaces that might be next to storm water drains or storm water runoff, then all of a sudden those chemicals can affect them. So, I think declining habitat quality for their fresh water phase might be the biggest concern that I have for American eel.

[00:05:01]I started eeling in I think 1974, maybe 75. And uh I was partners with Jay Harrington who was a fisherman when he came to Cape started to be a fisherman when he came to Cape Cod in early 70s and took off doing everything that historically he could find out about or saw other older fishermen doing or uh any of that and we lived on Sipson's Island and consequently you our life was around the the the bay for sure.

[00:05:45]So, we started eeling.

[00:05:50]I've never certainly never had caught eels before in my life and they're pretty fascinating, you know, and course they were meeting there end when when we were on the scene, but that's fishing.

[00:06:09]He started uh spearing and then at some point fairly early on, I got a license [music] to uh eel in fresh water.

[00:06:23]It's it's something I've never seen studied in the scientific literature. I haven't studied myself, but when I was younger, there were a lot of fishermen that had spears and they would spear eels [music] and it's almost gone. You know, we don't even have the estuarine ice anymore, but what I gathered from them was that it was mainly fresh water seeps, >> [music] >> ground water seeps that had warmer water and they would basically hibernate and they would all bun- they'd all ball up together and they would hibernate in these seeps [music] to just kind of maintain the metabolism for the winter. It made them easier to catch. But that's that's what I gathered from talking [music] to fishermen.

[00:07:02]The eel [music] spearing is an art um and you've got to know where to go and you've got to know what to look for and there's a lot it looks beautiful and and simple. It's not that simple because you've got to figure out where the eels might be and the bottom depends, you know, you you can throw stick your eel spear down the bottom and it's just nothing there to get. So, yeah, it Jay did that and he certainly started out doing that.

[00:07:39]Um but then potting was [music] way easier.

[00:07:49]When I first got into the the business, um I'd buy a a a roll of wire, hog rings, pliers, and make make my own pots.

[00:08:02]Which, you know, it was cheaper than buying them.

[00:08:06]In terms of Cape Cod and and I think the fisheries that used to occur here, um it was a very important fishery going way back, centuries really. It was a fish [music] that was caught easily in estuaries. People could spear them or pot them. So, people who didn't have a lot of income could just go out and find food to eat and eel was always one of those species.

[00:08:28]I used to >> [snorts] >> fish for [music] eels up until probably >> [music] >> between probably between around 2000 year 2005 or so.

[00:08:45]Fact do you know you're out alone on, you know, ask any fisherman why they fish. They just because you're out on the water and it's beautiful and you see a lot of interesting things. No two days are alike.

[00:08:58]You see a, you know, one day it's cloudy, the next day it's sunny or windy from a different direction than it was the day before and all of that has its value and I just was one of those guys who was interested in that stuff.

[00:09:17]We do know now that they navigate back to the continent using the Earth's magnetic field. They have magnetite in their skulls like Pacific salmon do. So, they move to the west from the Sargasso Sea towards the continent using the Earth's magnetic field. Then apparently once they get close, they use fresh water cues >> [music] >> to draw them into the fresh water rivers. They're just a fascinating part of nature. They're uh some people think they're the grossest things they've ever seen.

[00:09:46]>> [music] >> I think they're beautiful um and you know, they're slimy and as I said, they they grunt and they have little grunting sounds and a lot of people that equate them with snakes, which a lot of people are afraid of snakes. And I always loved snakes.

[00:10:07]Yeah, it's it's a very unique species [music] of fish. There's, you know, there's probably a dozen plus eel species around the world, but it's the only species like that in North America.

[00:10:16]Um, but it's this it's it's adapted to have this body form and this life history that is remarkably unique among fish in North America.

[00:10:27]Eeling was interesting for me, uh, for Well, I think you probably have to start [music] at the profit part of it. Um, but, you know, to make your living is just that. Um, but also they're just a fascinating part of nature.

[00:10:50]This behavior evolved millions of years ago.

[00:10:53]>> [music] >> And so, for some reason they found an adaptive advantage in terms of survival to leave freshwater habitats all these years ago >> [music] >> and move out to the Sargasso Sea. So, there was some evolutionary advantage to doing that. And it's our we can only guess as to what that is.

[00:11:11]Apparently, they found greater survival for their young going out there and then having their young return to the freshwater all that [music] distance.

[00:11:19]So, really hard to imagine what that advantage was, but there had to have been some advantage over a fish that just stayed [music] in one place.

[00:11:37]So, eel ladders are a design that enables eels to get over obstructions where they can't pass.

[00:11:43]Eels are like incredible. They're almost like amphibians where they can climb up vertical surfaces. They can go over land. If they have a roughened vertical surface that's wet, they can climb over that.

[00:11:57]And we were surprised by how many eels we caught, but I was also surprised sometimes by how many eels we didn't catch. You know, sometimes there were just like everything in fishing good [music] days, bad days, waxing, waning, moons, whatever, you know, all those things that make such [music] variables in fishing.

[00:12:18]Well, what what would constitute a good a good day of fishing would be you know, anything [music] from 40, 60, 80 lbs or more. Depends on where you where you went and it was always enough. Well, I'll I'll go again tomorrow. This was pretty good today.

[00:12:37]I think we overfished our eels in the '70s and '80s.

[00:12:41]And what happened, the European eel was very popular, very important for those cultures. They overfished their eel and they started [music] paying high prices to ship our eel over there. Those high prices prompted an overfishing process.

[00:12:57]We stored [music] You stored them. I In my recollection is they stored them in the in the pots until [music] it came time to sell them. A truck used to come from Newburyport with some salt water.

[00:13:10]It's sort of like an [music] oil truck oil tank truck and they would load the eels into that salt water tank on the back of the truck and those were taken to Logan Airport and flown to Germany predominantly. From there they would go to other countries, but I think I believe the fish market that they went to was Germany.

[00:13:42]And then there was one year I Well, one thing I used to always do like come came late come Labor Day I'd I'd car I'd start carving up my eels and not sell them. I'd wait till Christmas cuz when the water cooled down, you could store them for a long period of time.

[00:14:00]And just before Christmas I I'd sell them to fish markets in Boston. It's It's It's a tradition for Italians and other uh European people it's [music] the night of the seven fishes to have eels Christmas Eve.

[00:14:17]He I went down this alley and all of a sudden there's a >> [music] >> this is business. It's like a garage.

[00:14:25]You know, in a residential neighborhood.

[00:14:28]>> [snorts] >> And [music] I I the He knew I was coming, so the the [music] garage doors opened.

[00:14:36]And then there was six or seven people sitting in folding chairs with their 5-gallon buckets in front of them waiting for the eel man to show up.

[00:14:51]And when I showed up was like, "Yay!" You know, it's like people just kind of wait and wait and then I'd show up and like, "Hey, the eel man's here."

[00:15:00]So, Sal V, you know, I would say he in that his method of weight he'd use a bathroom scale with a bucket. And I couldn't like throw 80 or 100 lbs in a bucket. It was like 20 lbs, 20 lbs, 20 lbs and add them up and and he'd pay cash, which was great.

[00:15:18]>> [music] >> And he'd, you know, reach in his back pocket and he'd have the wad like that.

[00:15:28]Well, they would pot them in the, uh, say from May through the fall in with pots, and baited pots in estuaries. And the spring would happen in the winter.

[00:15:37]And and often, you know, sometimes some boats, sometimes through the ice and when the [music] eels were hunkering down. Potting still occurs, but at very low numbers.

[00:15:47]>> [music] >> And we have two potting studies. We go out and we catch the eel, we put electronic tag in them, release the eel, then we catch them again, and we can [music] come up with an estimate of population size by recapturing the tagged eels.

[00:15:59]We have two locations where we do that and we we catch a fair number of eels.

[00:16:03]So, eel potting is still viable, but is it viable to support large-scale fisheries? Not really.

[00:16:13]I remember the first the first day I went into, uh, it was, uh, Uppam Mill Pond.

[00:16:21]And I I set like 25 pots >> [music] >> and I went out the next day and I had over 400 lbs of eels.

[00:16:29]And there were I'd [music] pull a pot and it'd go, "Wow!

[00:16:32]They You can't get any more eels in this pot than there that are in there now."

[00:16:36]It's like, "How How did they even fit in there?" It was [music] just incredibly abundant.

[00:16:46]What are the different life stages for eels? We we call them glass eels, yellow eels, and silver eels. It's the same species. [music] They just they look so different that we give them different names. They arrive as a transparent glass eel in the spring from the Sargasso [music] Sea.

[00:17:01]They're transparent so they can avoid predators as they migrate across the ocean.

[00:17:05]When they enter our rivers, they gain black pigment and become dark so [music] they can hunker down and avoid predation. As they get older, they get yellow-brown.

[00:17:13]And then when they are mature, they silver or turn silvery black.

[00:17:22]About the eel sex. What's unusual about eel sex? Well, there is a lot. I think what we tend to call it is environmental sex determination.

[00:17:30]Which means the environment determines what sex they'll be. [music] It's common with reptiles where temperature, certain temperatures will make males and females. In terms of eels, um, we think it's density driven.

[00:17:42]And so, when the eels arrive in a watershed and there's lots of eels around, they tend to be male.

[00:17:47]And if there's fewer eels, they tend to become female. And the theory, what we think might be happening is that females need to gain this larger size to carry lots of eggs for their one trip to the Sargasso Sea. Males just need to get big enough to spawn once. And so, males don't need to have highly productive systems way up in the watershed. They tend to stay close to the tide and they tend to stay in in systems that are not so large.

[00:18:19]Why are American eels important? Well, I I think there's a cultural importance.

[00:18:23]It's very deep to Cape Cod. And as I mentioned earlier, I I think it's one of those forage species where people could go out and find food easily and and supplement their families' food that they brought to the table. So, I I think that culture it's it's similar to shellfishing, hunting, you know, gathering fish, gathering things to eat.

[00:18:42]I think it's really deeply part of our culture.

[00:18:45]And also, we want viable fisheries. We want fisheries where people can make money, people can recreate and and get [music] food to eat. So, I I think it's a species that we really should see some improvements in their population size.

[00:19:01]Jay was the one, you know, he just really took to being on Cape Cod and took to fishing and was really good at it and very interested in all of it.

[00:19:13][music] And he was innovative and I kind of just fell in as I say, because of necessity and, [music] um, we always basically said we couldn't have done this without each [music] other.

[00:19:29]Cuz I was game and he was gamer.

[00:19:39]>> [music] [music] >> Hey.