Did you know eels can crawl over land to get to water? Well, they can. Check out this eel information page from the Fish and Wildlife Service. Then view the video below as the eels head straight for the Hudson River once they’re dumped out of a bucket. The fish flopping around in the sand at the end is a brown bullhead.

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Both the eels and the bullhead were “borrowed” from the Hudson by Tom Lake of the state’s Hudson River Estuary Program for educational purposes and were being returned to their home. After the break is a story I wrote earlier this year about eels.

- Thursday, May 29, 2008

Edition: GWPR
Publication: The Journal News
Ossining students count Hudson River eels

CORTLANDT – Improvisation can be the backbone of any science research. Take, for instance, the state’s effort to examine one of the natural world’s best-kept secrets: the life of the American eel.

Flotation devices to secure the net that traps the tiny, baby eels? Two-liter soda bottles.

A vessel in which to carry some of the thread-like fish? Small, plastic kitchen containers usually used for leftovers.

A fine-mesh device to scoop up the filament-sized fish? A Braun permanent coffee filter.

“It’s OK. I graduated to a KitchenAid,” said Heidi Hellmich on a recent afternoon, explaining her sacrifice for the eel research project undertaken by her daughter Laura Hellmich and fellow student Dara Illowsky.

The mother and two Ossining High School sophomores were up to their knees in the Furnace Brook in Cortlandt, close to where it spills into the Hudson River. Since the middle of April, the two students have periodically anchored a 13-foot-long hoop net in the brook – parallel with the water’s flow, and its open end facing downstream.

“We coordinate our sampling around lunar phases – new, full, quarter,” said Laura Hellmich, 15.

The net sits in the brook the day before, the day of and the day after the particular moon phase.

“It looks like glass-eel migration might be coordinated to lunar phases,” Hellmich said.

“Glass eel” refers to the fish’s life stage. Eels, born more than 1,000 miles away in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, arrive in North American coastal rivers as about 1-year-old, 2-inch-long, transparent fish. The tiny eels work their way up the rivers, such as the Hudson, and into freshwater tributaries. There, they will spend most of their lives before migrating back to the Sargasso Sea, east of the Bahamas and south of Bermuda, to reproduce and die.

Beyond that, an eel’s life is mostly a mystery, filled with mights and maybes. A decline in their population has researchers trying to get a fix on the vagaries of a fish once studied by Aristotle.

“There’s really a lot more questions about American eels than answers,” said Chris Bowser, a science educator with the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s Hudson River National Estuarine Research Reserve.

The Furnace Brook work and similar undertakings by other students at three Dutchess County sites are under the direction of the estuary program. Hellmich and Illowsky are the only Westchester students participating in the juvenile eel study, which is in its first year. The work at all the sites will end by Saturday.

Eels are a commercially and recreationally important fish, both as food and as bait to catch other fish. The recreational harvest of eels in 2005 was 58,154 pounds, down from a peak of 229,541 in 1985, according to figures from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. Similarly, commercial landings went from a high of 3.95 million pounds in 1979 to a low of 641,255 in 2001 and rebounded to about 731,000 pounds in 2004.

In its American eel profile, the commission points out “yellow” eels – the stage before they begin their final migration back to the Sargasso – are at historic low levels for unknown reasons.

“This type of fish has existed for millions of years, yet we’re seeing declines in their numbers at many East Coast sites without a clear reason,” Bowser said. “Student-level research can help answer some basic questions about this very mysterious animal. When do they arrive, and can we tell if different factors, such as lunar cycles or temperature, affect their numbers?”

The sophomores’ citizen-science work is part of their participation in Ossining High School’s Science Research Program, through which students earn high school and college credit. Valerie Holmes, the program’s co-director, said the two bring dedication and determination.

“It’s not your typical high school student who is willing to wade waist-high into the murky waters of the Hudson River estuary,” Holmes said.

Their research, she added, shows that the Hudson and its tributaries remain potential habitat for the fish, despite development and other changes taking place along the shores.

“As one of their science research teachers at Ossining High School, what I really hope these girls take away from this experience is a feeling of accomplishment and the satisfaction of answering a research question that leading researchers in this field have yet to address,” Holmes said.

For Illowsky, 15, the project was a chance to pursue her interest in marine biology.

“It’s really cool to work with them hands-on,” she said.

As the Hudson fills with the incoming tide, it pushes the tiny, transparent fish into Furnace Brook and other smaller waterways. Once the glass eels swim into the funnel-like net, known as a fyke net, they cannot reverse direction and escape.

On a spring afternoon, Hellmich and Illowsky rolled back sections of the net as the brook flowed around their wader-clad legs. A belted kingfisher flying by rattled its call and, somewhere closer to the Hudson, a train blew its horn.

“I think I see a clump (of eels),” Hellmich said, peering into the net as Illowsky grabbed the white bucket into which the fish would be placed.

“That’s what we like to hear,” said Bowser of the DEC.

Reach Michael Risinit at mrisinit@lohud.com or 845-228-2274.

American eel facts

- American eels are catadromous fish, spending most of their life in fresh or brackish water and migrating to salt water to spawn. American shad and striped bass, on the other hand, are andramous – living most of their lives in the ocean before returning to rivers to reproduce.

- Larval eels, or leptocephali, and glass eels depend on the Gulf Stream and other currents to disperse them to the rivers and streams where they will spend much of their lives.

- American eels reach sexual maturity between 8 and 24 years of age.

- American eels can absorb oxygen through their skin as well as their gills, enabling them to travel over land, particularly in wet grass or mud, which could help them move around barriers in streams.

- Adults, known as silver eels, return to the Sargasso Sea, where females release between 20 and 30 million eggs and the males fertilize them.

Source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service