Jeff Medor was fishing for bowfin with his sons on Lake Champlain in eastern Alburgh when one of his kids caught something unusual: an American eel.
While that eel looked healthy, that same week they spotted another one on shore, dead.
“And then another one and another one,” he said. “I think we’re up to six here.”
Bernie Pientka, a fisheries biologist with the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife, said the state has received reports of 16 dead eels washed up on northern Lake Champlain so far this year — up from one last year.
“It’s not necessarily huge,” he said. “But it’s not a common occurrence.”
The dead eels being reported are larger fish, probably 8 to 10 years old, that seem to be prepping for migration, he said.
Adult American eels spawn in the Sargasso Sea — an area of the North Atlantic Ocean named after the free-floating, brown Sargassum seaweed that provide food and habitat for a range of marine life. Ocean currents slowly take the young eels inland to fresh water, where they can end up as far north as Greenland and as far south as the Venezuelan coast. When eels are mature, between 10 and 25 years old, they migrate back to the Sargasso.
The eels that end up in Lake Champlain come in from the St. Lawrence River through the Richelieu River in Quebec. The Richelieu once supported a commercial eel fishery, but that closed in 1998 because the eel population had significantly declined. Biologists have linked the decline to the rebuilding of two old dams on the river.
American eel are facing broader population declines. While the species is not listed as federally endangered, scientists with the International Union for Conservation of Nature added the fish to its “red list” in 2014, in part due to increased fishing pressure from Asian markets.
Pientka said fish ladders have been installed on dams on the Richelieu to provide eels migrating upstream with access to Lake Champlain. A Quebec fishermen’s group and Hydro-Quebec also collaborated on a 10-year eel stocking program to bring more fish from the Atlantic upstream.
Nicholas Staats, a fishery biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, wrote in a summary of a 2016 Lake Champlain American eel survey that while the number of eels in the lake appears to be increasing, biologists are finding more larger eels, which suggests eels are struggling to enter the lake from the Richelieu.
The department has taken one of the eels to analyze — most have been too far gone to tell what caused their death, said Pientka. Swimbladder nematode, a worm-like parasite, has started cropping up in American eels down South, “so we wonder if that might be a factor,” Pientka added.
The Department of Fish and Wildlife is asking members of the public to report any dead eels.