And I mean to have Jodi on day four of this.
It's like 9 p.m. and she's texting me about eels.
This is her free time.
This woman has decided to Google the Sargasso Sea when she could be sleeping.
Which. Which is to say, it's thousands of miles.
Like it's it's far the distance they have to travel to the Sargasso Sea.
That's amazing. This is beyond the shore from Michigan public.
I'm Rebecca Williams. This is the final story in our series about the Great Lakes.
One story per lake. A sort of snapshot.
A little microcosm of what makes each lake unique.
Chapter five Lake Ontario.
Unsafe passage. This story is brought to us by Kate Furby,
Michigan public's environment reporter.
An eel world. The biggest, oldest females reproduce the most.
And Lake Ontario is like the headquarters of the eel Queens.
So the lake is critical habitat for the global population of American eels.
When you told me that they weren't just eels,
they were like a badass gang of Lady eels in Lake Ontario.
I mean, that changes everything, right?
How can you not cheer for these lady eels completely being like,
yeah, Lake Ontario is our home.
What are you gonna do about it?
That's Jodie Westrick, Michigan public's director of digital
audiences. Our plan was to go on an eel road trip,
drive 500 miles of the American Eels, 3000 plus mile migratory route,
stop along the way to see eels and talk to zookeepers,
scientists and community members.
These eels spend most of their lives in Lake Ontario,
but their whole lifecycle is unbelievable.
It involves multiple complete transformations,
thousands of miles of migration, numerous death traps and mystery sex.
But the Lake Ontario eels are in trouble, and the eel doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Humans are animals, too.
We're part of ecosystems, and in my experience as an ecologist,
unhealthy habitats also hurt people.
So this is an eel story, but with human neighbors,
human family really, as you'll see.
And the tragedy of the eels has carved out wounds in its communities.
One of the eels challenges might be a perception problem because it's not a four
legged furry friend.
They're made out to be evil.
Like, I feel like eels have this really bad PR campaign.
Whenever we would catch them, you know, it was like,
they're horrible. They're slimy, they're scary.
Before we left for our trip, I talked with Lisa Holtz,
the rare fish unit leader at the New York State Department of Environmental
Conservation.
If you think about a large eel that's been resident in Lake Ontario eating and doing her
thing, chilling with her besties for for a couple of decades,
by the time she gets back out to the Sargasso Sea,
she is full of more eggs than, say, a smaller eel that might be coming from
a population closer to the Sargasso Sea.
Lake Ontario eels are mostly female and live about 15 to 40 years.
It's a combination of geographical and environmental factors that explains why
they're all female. Lake Ontario eels are historically important for the whole species
globally, and here's why.
First, we need to zoom out.
Way out. American eels are one breeding population from Greenland all the way to
Venezuela. They live in accessible rivers and lakes in between until they're ready to
spawn, and then they go out to sea.
So Lake Ontario eels swim all the way out through the Saint Lawrence River to a place
in the North Atlantic called the Sargasso Sea.
It's bounded by currents, topped with mats of floating seaweed.
And just for added drama overlaps the Bermuda Triangle.
It's about the same size as the continental US,
But it's also like an island of water within water.
So we're measuring a blob.
And nobody's ever actually seen it happen that I know of.
But they get together as one giant group and they spawn and that's it.
They spawn once and they die.
We think just because we never see them again.
One thing that really struck me as we went through this journey.
American eels are extremely strange and surprisingly hard to study due to research
limitations and the lack of consistent data collection over time.
The eel facts in this story pretty much all have caveats.
We are constantly updating our idea of the eel,
and there's still so much we don't know.
In tracking studies, scientists have seen tagged eels go to the Sargasso.
They've recorded the eels diving hundreds of meters deep.
The theory is that they're mating deep in the ocean,
in the Sargasso Sea, where it's dark and cold and secret.
And then teeny tiny, unrecognizable, pretty much transparent little leaf looking
larvae start to appear, and those itty bitty s have to now swim slash
drift slash. Catch a ride on the Gulf Stream all the way back to their freshwater
habitats, North and South America.
And as they go, they're growing and eating and transforming so that by the time they
reach freshwater, they're looking more eel like and more solid.
During this entire time, I had zero concept of where the Sargasso Sea
was. I mean, I was just not in my head along like I did.
So I figured you should probably Google it to like,
really understand. And so I was texting Kate because you don't realize how far away the
Sargasso Sea is and the fact that they're coming back,
it's these little tiny babies, like they're making that journey that far.
And can I just say that, like being on a reporting trip with someone
and you're on day four of 12 hour days where we are doing nothing but eels.
Like even my small talk in the car was eels.
I brought multiple books.
You made a playlist?
I made an eel playlist.
An eel.
Playlist. There's this band called The eels.
Never heard of them.
We had eel hats. As you know.
Jody and I were gone for five days.
We did not tell Rebecca, my editor.
Anything, anything. What do you know so far about the story?
You went to Canada and you were looking for eels.
And then we sent you an update of Kate eating a bagel.
Did you actually see any eels?
We did.
We saw, like, five alive.
Yeah.
Let's call this mile marker zero for our trip.
Our first time seeing eels.
Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
First stop, the Toronto Zoo this morning.
It's so cute. You can see there's one little eyeball visible.
It looks like you got a decent pile in here so we can see there are four in total,
but they're very good. Burrowers.
Sam Murchie is the lead keeper for fishes at the Toronto Zoo.
We're crowding around the eel exhibit with him while visitors walk by and stare
curiously at what appears to be an empty tank with a pile of logs.
They're a gift that keeps on giving.
As far as just how fascinating they are, because you can spend your professional life
just thinking about their life cycle and never even getting into the migratory aspect.
I think so.
After meeting Sam and the Toronto Eels, we continue our own migration.
We're driving from Toronto along the northern coast of Lake Ontario and out along the Saint
Lawrence River. Our budget wouldn't let us go all the way to Bermuda.
The first day we drive about 100 miles, we stop in a small town at the northeast
coast of Lake Ontario, and then we wake up the next morning and
there's like, snow on everything.
We have to, like, borrow an ice scraper.
And then we start driving.
Right now with the snow and everything being cold.
We can pretty much assume that the eels in Lake Ontario are currently,
like, buried in the mud.
I mean.
Given this economy, I don't blame them.
I too would like to be buried under a rock.
160 miles of near whiteout driving.
Later, we arrive at the Saint Lawrence River Institute.
It's a non-profit in Cornwall, Ontario, founded in partnership with the
Mohawk Council of Akwesasne.
This is Marianne Perrin, an aquatic ecologist at the institute.
This is one of the most important habitats for American eel in the world.
The Saint Lawrence River comes out of Lake Ontario,
dividing the U.S. and Canada before going out to the Atlantic Ocean.
Prior to 1985, hundreds of thousands, sometimes over a million eels,
took that route each year.
And in 1986 that number crashed significantly.
So there's been a huge loss in the abundance of American eel for the river.
The eels passing through the Saint Lawrence River had been through considerable human
impacts, including heavy pollution of mercury and PCBs,
in addition to fishing, climate change and invasive species.
Part of Marianne's work has been digging into the available data and published research.
What are the hypotheses for the crash of the eel,
and which ones have real evidence behind them?
Yeah. So in the Saint Lawrence watershed, they estimated that there is 8411 dams.
There are two major hydroelectric dams in this part of the river.
In 1932, the Arnaud Dam went online, and in 1958 the Moses-saunders Dam
Moses-saunders is an internationally run dam.
It spreads the one kilometre width of the river run by the New York Power Authority,
or Nypa, on the US side, and Ontario Power Generation,
or OPG on the Canadian side.
Each side produces enough power for hundreds of thousands of homes,
but once the dam is installed, it can reduce the available habitat for the
eels, cutting them off from their natural migration.
In some cases, the eels are reported to crawl out of the water and across the rocks in
their attempts to continue their migration upstream.
And we're lucky here in the sense that starting in the 70s,
eels got access to that upstream habitat once again.
Over time, eel ladders are slowly put in at the different dams.
The Moses-saunders dam ladder sort of looks like a wheelchair ramp zigzagging up.
To start the journey, the eels must first locate the ladder,
which is sort of the width of a sidewalk.
There's just one on either side of the kilometer long dam.
Once they begin the climb, the journey can take hours,
but it provides a route option for the first leg of their migration and before the crash,
an average of 2000 eels per day were recorded going through the eel ladder during their
peak migration. But the latter only works one way to go back out to sea.
As adults, they have to make it back through the dam turbines.
What does it take for an eel to make safe passage through the turbine?
Look, if you think of a propeller that's, you know,
that's going extremely fast.
They just need to sort of be in that opening at the right time.
There are differing mortality estimates here,
depending on where and when the studies were done.
But a commonly used study from the late 90s estimated the mortality at about 40% after
passing through both dams.
And the study was only counting the ones that died within the first few days.
Some of these EOS might survive going through the turbines,
but they have scrapes or lacerations or vertebrae damage.
We don't know if they're making it or not.
One program, partially funded by OPG, helps get a few thousand meals per year
around the dam. Commercial fishers trap the eels,
and then the eels are trucked around the dammed up river.
It's a small number compared to how many eels used to do this trip,
but every eel helps. It does force another question,
though. Is there a way to make the turbines safer for the fish to begin with?
So these fish safe turbines, instead of being a blade,
they're more of like a scoop that will help sort of scoop the eels through the turbines
to allow downstream passage.
Both power companies that run the Moses-saunders Dam,
Nypa and OPG, declined recorded interviews, but Nypa did send a statement that it has
been an active collaborator on a design feasibility study examining turbine design to
aid downstream eel passage.
In 2024, OPG announced a project to refurbish the Canadian side of the dam to increase
electricity production, but no mention is made of the eel.
In the announcement of the construction, OPG declined to provide comment on fish safe
turbines. Since our interview and tour requests were declined,
we visited the OPG Dam Visitor's Centre to learn more.
There's a big exhibit in the back with a banner that reads Inundation Day.
It tells the story of the dam construction and how,
as a necessary part of the dam, the river water levels change,
flooding parts of the populated shoreline.
The placard reads The Lost Homeland.
It says 6000 hectares of traditional lands were flooded and lost.
The values, culture and livelihoods of the Mohawk.
People of Akwesasne were changed forever.
The Mohawk people were given no opportunity to influence the projects or to share in the
benefits. Abraham Francis grew up in Cornwall.
He's an ecologist.
My first memory of eel was like them of like finding them on the shoreline.
Dogs loved them, loved to roll in them, and they would just stink,
you know, that was like a big thing. Every year we would see a lot of eel chopped up and
whatever in the river, but now we don't see that anymore.
Part of the reason that we chose to come to Cornwall is that it's located just downstream
from the Moses-saunders Dam, the dead and dying eels that have been hit by
the turbines wash up along the shoreline.
Here I'm Deer Clan in Mohawk from Akwesasne.
I am getting my PhD in Environmental Science and engineering.
It's my understanding of like indigenous science is it's very much about like
observation. But like, what is the lesson in that observation?
Or what is it telling us about?
What kind of issues are out there that we need to address?
And, and like, that's what brought me to the eel.
We researched these issues.
We understand the problems, and then we develop approaches to address
that, whether that's policy, whether that's more research.
However, that looks like perhaps it is like a funeral procession.
And the passenger pigeon used to have like ceremony specifically for it,
but they went extinct.
And now they're a dance and they're a song.
What kind of like relationships and language and knowledge that we lose because of that
loss? Like for the eel.
The eel is a clan species, and for us, the clans are the way that we
organize our governance.
But more importantly for me, it's how we organize around grief and loss.
And I wonder what that means to us as a people.
Like we lose a clan species.
Are we going to watch the loss of a relative in this way,
when we have their solutions out there, there's all sorts of relationships that we
have with the eel that would have enshrined them as an important relative of ours.
It feels like as indigenous people were screaming into the void to be heard,
and we keep getting ignored.
Like so many different things that we are disproportionately dealing with as a
community, that is a consequence of this environmental violence that we have
experienced. It begins with the dam.
It begins with the pollution it, you know, and even further back,
it starts with residential schools.
It starts with the way that these different imposed ideologies implicated us as a people.
Residential schools were usually boarding schools where indigenous children weren't
allowed to speak their language or celebrate their culture.
They were mandatory from the late 1800s all the way through the 1990s.
In some places.
I think my grief is like situated within.
Like feeling powerless.
And it's like, not even just like me.
It's so many of like my relatives, like the eel.
As a relative, it's my family.
It's frustrating on so many levels for me, this system and who's in power and policy
decisions, those kill us and they're killing the eel and they're killing the environment.
And, and I think that really the power and benefit of bringing indigenous people,
indigenous knowledge into the forefront, we have cultures that emerge directly from
these landscapes. We have been caring for them for millennia,
and we can teach the people around us how to do that,
but we have to be supported.
And I don't even know if we have enough time.
You know, I believe that the eel, if we set the light table correctly,
aka like if there was a mechanism for them to go up and down the river,
then they'll come home and they'll be on those natural movements,
and we'll have a stronger global population to be able to,
to keep us going in perpetuity.
I want you back. I want you to be here for future generations.
That's what I really want.
And I think it's possible.
Abrahams, PhD work focuses on shoreline management.
In addition to the science, he and Marianne also work to create science
outreach projects, meet with community leaders and policy makers to raise awareness
of the struggle of the American eels in the Saint Lawrence River.
It's a very, very ugly story, and I think a lot of the ugliness was placed
on the eels as the ugly animal, the ugly fish.
But really, the ugliness is coming from the industry and what we're doing to the eel.
Stephanie Hildebrand is a photographer and documentarian in Cornwall,
Ontario.
We started getting a lot of reports from fishermen on the river,
about like hundreds of dead eels on the bottom of the river.
And it wasn't the first time that we get reports like that.
But for the first time in 2022, we saw it for ourselves and it was really,
really shocking.
What follows here is a pretty graphic description of dying eels.
She was paralyzed, kind of like from the back end.
Like the front end could still kind of swim, but the back end was not following.
It was super sad. This was probably the first eel photo that I took.
She's floating with her belly up and kind of some of the bellies sticking out of the
water. So essentially, like her entire tail is just kind of shredded
and the tips just kind of hanging down.
She was dead. Yeah, but I think we've we've found some that are in that exact shape and
they're still alive. Yeah, it was just super shocking.
And I remember having nightmares about it.
Like it was really like it was awful.
There's a record from the 70s where the energy company came to clean the piles of
dead eels like it was.
It was thousands of pounds of dead eels, you know?
So this this is nothing.
So you could imagine the smell and just how many eels there were.
And that now actually, like we're seeing less and less and less dead
eels, but it's because there's less eels.
One of the scientists from the River Institute offered to take us out on a boat to
see the dam and the river for ourselves.
I have so many layers on the boat.
Motor was frozen to start.
They ran hot water from a tea kettle through it.
I mean, the whole boat's full of ice right now.
Oh, a lot of it's coming out now.
Okay, there we go. Yeah.
Then all we had to do was put on giant orange survival suits.
The kind that inflate.
If you fall in and will keep you alive for, like,
an hour. Oh, my gosh, I feel like we're going to Antarctica.
I know.
Yeah. Perfect. Okay. So you can see here's our position here.
So we're actually it's taking a second, but we're going to go up this way.
This is Matt Windle, a research scientist at the River Institute.
He's our captain for the day.
The river is partially frozen.
So in addition to survival suits, Matt is wearing ski goggles.
And I'm wearing a ski mask.
All right, so I'll just kind of bring it up gradually to speed. So if you need to hang on
to anything you can hang on to.
The damn cuts a thick grey line between the blue sky and the glassy river.
We see it in the distance for a while before we get close.
To our left of us is. This is Cornwall Island and that's part of Akwesasne.
I'll stop at the the location where the eels keep piling up.
I don't think we'll see any because it's.
It's been a while since they would have been migrating back down,
but you never know. Lots of eel, injured eels and dying eels and dead eels
have been accumulating just on this upward slope here.
And we call it the eel pile.
Their bellies are white, so when they're upside down.
Is that one over there? Yeah.
Oh, we're looking for dead eels right now.
Yeah. In the water.
We just found one. Okay.
Can you see it?
Oh, wow. Okay. It looks big from here, that's for sure.
There are over a meter long. The the larger mature ones,
they can be over £10, actually.
We have the largest and oldest eels in all of North America,
in the Saint Lawrence River and Great Lakes and the Ottawa River system.
Finding a dead eel this time of year was unexpected.
They migrate during the summer, and it's early spring still,
so it's possible this eel was preserved since then,
but we don't know. And now it's time to leave Cornwall and drive the last leg of the
trip. Oh, we still have an hour and 14 minutes.
Somehow I feel like it keeps getting longer.
I need to tell you about the final transformation of eel.
So do you want me to do the song?
Okay.
Transformers.
Eels in disguise.
I think for copyright purposes, we have to call them like eel formers.
Fish shifters.
As they start their migration, the eels basically go through puberty getting
reproductively mature, stopping digestion, growing their eyes huge
and using their fat reserves to make this long journey.
So they're just getting their reproductive organs and like their body is telling them
like, hey girl, it's time to mate.
And then they can't even like, have a special little treat.
No more snacks.
And for us mere humans, we have 214 miles of driving to our final
stop. Quebec City. Here we're meeting with Jean-Francois Dumont,
a biologist and the American Eel management coordinator for the Quebec Ministry of
Environment and Wildlife.
Can you like, just gesture for us?
Like tell us You know, like they're going to come from here they
come.
Sorry.
I don't know where we are.
Michigan is in that direction.
We're standing by the Saint Lawrence River.
And look, I, I got a little turned around, but but we're close to Quebec City where the
river is narrow. And all of this water has to come from upstream from Lake Ontario and
Niagara Falls and beyond to the rest of the Great Lakes.
This is a really a lot of water, more than five 6000 cubic meter per second.
But it will soon open up and flow out to the Atlantic.
And with it the mature eels and.
Understanding the movements of the mature eels is just one of the many things that
Jean-Francois is working on with his collaborators across the region nicknamed the
Fantastic Nine. In one example, they capture the tagged eels in tidal traps
in the river, and they scan the tags to know which ones went where.
This kind of tracking information is important for understanding eel behavior and
natural migratory patterns.
And actually what is good is that we observe a kind of stability.
We are on a flatbed period each year.
We have a plus or minus one, 175,000 eels that are joining the Sargasso
Sea.
Okay. So it's stable, but it's low.
Yeah. We are we are on the, the, the bottom.
Jean-francois and his team also work on otolith shape and chemistry.
He describes the otolith as a black box recorder for the fish.
It's a calcified structure in their ear that lays down a daily mineral layer like a tree
ring.
The chemical component for each layer are related to the water where they are living.
So that's what. It's a very powerful tool.
The outlet can give you a signal about the water where the eel grows,
but you cannot have other information about what happened in the Sargasso Sea.
Eels are mysterious.
And now there's one last moment of surprise for us to share.
Back with Rebecca, my editor.
We do this whole interview with him, and he's telling us all this really cool
stuff about their biology and how scientists are working to track them.
And so I keep recording and we walk back out to my car.
They are everywhere. The problem is upstream.
But the reason, you know.
Oh wait, they stay here.
They don't go to Lake Ontario.
Exactly.
And I'm like, what? And we're just at this point in Quebec City where the eels have free
safe passage to go out.
There's. There's no dams yet.
And my first thought is like, I can't wait to tell.
Jody and he's like, okay, bye bye bye bye bye.
Thank you.
I start a new recording.
This is ambient sound for the pier.
This is actually just me excitedly walking back to Jody to tell her the good news about
the river eels.
Oh, running.
She was running.
I ran.
Guess what? Okay, right.
As we were like saying goodbye, we were like talking about just eels.
I don't know, I don't remember. Naturally he said something like,
yeah, well, you know, out here we have like so many eels and.
Like there are no dams between where we are now and like all the way out there,
right. There are plenty of female eels who come here and decide,
for whatever reason, not to continue their journey.
They stay and they live their whole lives here. Jody.
Oh my God. I've never been so happy.
Oh my God. Like, I mean, literally the last thing.
It's hopeful. Oh my God.
I want to cry like tears.
Of.
Happiness. Oh, sorry. Sorry.
Jody has set up this, like, elaborate time lapse,
and I have just run into her set up.
And then she has gotten so excited.
About what? I've just told her that now we're, like, hugging and we're, like,
knocking the tripods over.
That's so sweet. Oh, thank God you got some good news.
I know it's a complicated piece of news.
If an eel stops earlier in the river, she might not get as big or produce as many
eggs. But she avoids added dam danger.
American eels make an incredible journey twice in their life,
moving from open ocean to freshwater and back again.
The odds are stacked against them, increasingly so with climate change and other
human impacts. But animals that can travel thousands of miles while basically going
through puberty on no snacks at all can probably do anything given the chance.
The problem is that they're not currently getting much of one,
and they're not suffering alone.
They're a symptom of wider environmental issues in North America.
American eels have been around for millions of years.
The real story starts before humans, maybe even before North America,
because eels are slippery.
Unbothered by space and time seeming to exist outside of what we think we know about how
ocean's evolution and even bodies function.
Kate Furby and Jodie Westrich reported and produced this episode with editing from me,
Vincent Duffy, Dustin Dwyer and Jodie Westrich.
Special thanks to Randy karst, Jean-Francois Dumont,
Danielle Labonté, and Stephanie Hildebrand for additional photos and footage.
Support for the production of this podcast was made possible by the Charles Stewart Mott
Foundation as part of its Great Lakes News Collaborative.
Music by blue Dot sessions.
I'm Rebecca Williams. Beyond the shore is a production of Michigan Public.
You can find all of our podcasts at Michigan public.org slash.