Poughkeepsie students wade into Hudson River Eel Project ‘Every species is important, no matter how slimy’ |
On Board Online • May 27, 2013
By Cathy Woodruff
Senior writer
Poughkeepsie city school students are playing a role in welcoming and encouraging some of New York’s smallest visitors, baby eels.
About 75 students and 12 adult staff members are among hundreds of volunteers along the Hudson River who help environmental scientists monitor the spring migration of young eels from the Sargasso Sea, south of Bermuda and north of Puerto Rico, to New York State.
The citizen scientists are part of a statewide effort called the Hudson River Eel Project. Every day at 4 p.m., students and other district volunteers pull on waist-high fishing waders and shuffle into a Hudson tributary to look for the American eel (Anguilla rostrata), which has been in decline over much of its range. They check cone-shaped traps, called fyke nets, to see how many of the tiny, translucent fish have arrived in the last 24 hours.
They keep it up for about six weeks each spring. “We’re just trickling down to the end of eel season,” Environmental Science Teacher Mark Angevine told On Board in mid-May.
Angevine credits the eel project with bringing together a diverse array of students who otherwise might not cross paths in school. Students of varied ages, racial backgrounds and levels of academic ability, work as teams to open nets, scoop out the contents and count their lively catch, “eel by eel,” said Angevine. “We find that the autistic kids are especially good at (counting the eels) because they concentrate harder,” he said.
Known as “glass eels” because of their transparency, the young fish are about two inches long. The nets also can capture slightly older, fully-pigmented eels known as “elvers.” Sample groups are weighed, environmental data is recorded and then the babies are released beyond the nearest dam or culvert to continue their migration.
The eels live in freshwater streams and lakes for years or even decades before returning to the sea to breed.
This year’s bumper crop of eels – an average of more than 300 each day – is providing plenty of fodder for discussion about the effects of stream turbidity, temperature and water quality on eels and other indicators of a healthy river, Angevine said.
The numbers are up from previous years and offer encouragement about the future ecology of the river and survival of the eels, he said.
“It goes back to the old story of the canary in the coal mine,” he said. “The glass eels are our canaries.”
The Poughkeepsie site is one of about a dozen study sites along the river, from Richmond Creek in Staten Island to the Hannacroix Creek in Albany County. New York’s “eel community” also includes college students, retirees and professional scientists.
The state Department of Environmental Conservation collaborates with Cornell University’s New York State Water Resources Institute to coordinate and oversee the annual project, which has been the subject of a documentary web video by the PBS series Nature.
Ashawna Abbott, a Poughkeepsie senior, told Nature that when she first heard about a project to study eels, “I would think of something electric and something slimy and really gross … I would never touch it. But picking the glass eels from the net, I see they don’t electrocute you. They don’t bite you.”
The video also features the DEC’s education coordinator on the project, Chris Bowser, who brims with enthusiasm as he describes the interest the project fosters among the students and other volunteers: “We are building a community of people who care about eels, who know about eels, who are willing to get in the stream and do something about eels.”
As one student quoted on DEC’s Eel Project website put it: “Every species is important, no matter how slimy.”
To see the Nature documentary, go to http://goo.gl/MVMIj.