The Life of the American Eel

The range of the American eel in Canada encompasses all accessible freshwater in Eastern Canada’, estuaries, and coastal marine waters connected to the Atlantic Ocean up to the mid-Labrador coast (see figure. Eels have been regularly found up to Hamilton Inlet-Lake Melville, Labrador (Scott and Crossman, 1973; Mandrak and Crossman, 1992). However, eels have also been discovered farther north in Labrador in the English River.

The American Eel is a species that holds ecological, cultural, and economic importance. The American Eel catadromous and semelparous fish thus they are made up of a single population that migrates long distances (>5000 km) from their rearing habitats to reproduce in the Sargasso Sea and then die in the river system of Canada and the Great Lakes (see figures).

When they are young, they migrate to freshwater rivers or lakes, brackish estuaries, or nearshore coastal parts of the Atlantic Ocean. When the American Eel is at its yellow stage is mainly found in nearshore lotic and lentic waters with varying substrate types, and they may either overwinter in burrows or aggregate in bays/estuaries on mud substrates. As silver-stage eels, they migrate back to the Sargasso Sea during the late summer or fall, and environmental factors such as light, tidal directions, discharge, and lunar phase have been found to influence migration and movements. In the Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River region, the American Eel sub-population has experienced a drastic decline in recruitment by more than 99%, and this region was historically an important source of larger and more fertile female spawners that will contribute significantly to the overall spawning biomass (COESEWIC, 2006). The decline in American Eel can be attributed to various factors, including barriers to fish upstream migration, commercial and recreational harvest, changing ocean conditions, and mortality at hydroelectric facilities during their downstream migration. In response to the decline, a moratorium was placed on harvesting eel for Lake Ontario fisheries, the American Eel was listed as Endangered in Ontario, under Ontario’s Endangered Species Act in 2007. This essentially gives legal protection for the habitat of the American eel in Ontario.