Brenda, Liv, Carlos, Richard, and Ariel are students at Poughkeepsie High School. They were recently at the Fall Kill creek by the Mid-Hudson Discovery Museum with their science teacher Mark Angevine for a very particular science project: They’re counting young American eels.
Since 2008, Hudson Valley students have been working with state’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to count the eels.
Liv, Ariel, and DEC Science Educator Sarah Mount explained that the juvenile American eels are called glass eels, and they’re transparent.
“You want to see the heart inside of one of the clear ones?” Liv asked.
Mount explained, “You have to look so closely, and then you can see their little hearts beating. One of the really cool things about glass eels is that because they're transparent you can see their internal organs.”
“It looks like a little splotch,” said Ariel pointing out the eel’s little brown heart.
Mount, who was accompanying the student group says American eels are mysterious creatures that have declined in population but are on the rebound. She said, historically, the eels may have made up the majority of the fish biomass in streams like the Fall Kill.
Mount says in the past 19 years that they’ve been collecting data they’ve seen the eel population slowly recovering, especially in the past 10 years.
Where they come from, though, is a question that the likes of Aristotle and Sigmund Freud pondered.
“Nobody has ever seen eels spawning in the wild. I say that they spawn in the Sargasso Sea, but nobody's ever actually observed adults spawning. That's just the general region of the ocean where scientists have caught the smallest larval eels, and people have been asking the question of, where do eels come from for over for 1000s of years,” Mount explained.
Mount said American eels can live up to 30 years, grow up to 3 feet long, and will go back out into the ocean to reproduce just once.
Some challenges for eel populations include climate change, dams and barriers that block migration, historical overfishing, pollution, habitat degradation, and water quality changes.
“They have gills. They can breathe underwater, but they also can absorb oxygen through their skin. So they're like a super powered fish. They can do really amazing things. They can swim out on land on a wet, rainy night. They can come out and, like, get around some of those barriers,” Mount continued.
The students catch the eels with a fyke net that looks like a Y-shaped cone. It goes into a funnel and sits on the rocks, where the Fall Kill meets the Hudson River, and is used to catch eels coming in from the ocean. The tides from the Atlantic reach the creek, causing its water level to rise and fall.
Brenda, a student who has been part of the Eel Project for two years, says the work is fascinating – and she likes that it’s hands on.
“They're slimy, so it feels nice having them like, slip in your hands and like counting them. That's the joy of nature because nature provides, nature protects,” Brenda said.
When asked if she’s scared of the eels, she laughs, “No, no, because I've been touching snakes since I was a little kid.”
Mount and Angevine explained to the students that the count helps educate the community and influences the work of professional ecologists.
“You guys are doing real science that's contributing to real management decisions, to real actions,” Mount said.
“This data’s been included in in places where no other citizen science data has ever been accepted, but our data got in so it's high-quality data,” explained Angevine.
By the end of the day the students caught: 256 glass eels, 12 elvers, the more mature stage of the American eels, one weatherfish, and two scuds.
After an hour, the students packed up. But they will be back again next week to continue the count.
