Times article about Eels

[Frederick W. Schueler]

* Here's the text of an article in this week's North Grenville Times,
including a poem of mine which I wrote in 1990 when I wasn't really
aware of the role dams had played in the decline, or that Eels hadn't
been in the Rideau system.

fred.
------------------------------------------------------------
---------Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad ------------
Fragile Inheritance Natural History - https://fragileinheritance.ca/
6 St-Lawrence Street Bishops Mills, RR#2 Oxford Station, Ontario K0G 1T0
on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44.87156° N 75.70095° W
------------------------------------------------------------

Hope for Eels

Fred Schueler & Aleta Karstad - Fragile Inheritance Natural History

Eastern Ontario is bounded by great rivers, flowing in failed
continental rifts, which before railways were its primary routes of
human commerce and travel. Through the first half of the 20th Century,
the Ottawa and St Lawrence were dammed to become the region's primary
source of electric energy, inadvertently gradually eliminating what had
been their primary residents, Anguilla rostrata, the American Eel.

Eels are one population from Brazil to Greenland; they mature in
freshwater, and all migrate downstream to the Sargasso Sea of the
Atlantic Ocean to breed. The larvae drift and swim westward (their
European cousins somehow manage to separate out and go eastwards),
entering freshwater as tiny elvers. Those in coastal marshes and
tributaries become males, and those who go farther upstream become
female, and the Great Lakes/Ottawa drainages once produced 60% of the
females for the population.

It's likely that before the construction of the Canal there were no Eels
in the Rideau system because the elvers wouldn't have been able to
wriggle up the 11 metres of Rideau Falls, but they were a major food
resource for First Nations along both major rivers: upstream of Mattawa
Pimisi Bay is named for the Eels that were once there, and with Atlantic
Salmon Eels were the dominant fish in Lake Ontario. Their dramatic
decline here has been due to failure of elvers to get upstream past dams
and the huge mortality of returning adults in hydroelectric turbines,
while in the Maritime provinces they suffer from a parasite introduced
from Japan, and poaching of elvers for captive rearing.

At the St Lawrence River Institute's “Changing Waters” River Symposium
last week, the plight of the Eels loomed over the conference as one of
the biggest changes the river has suffered. There were displays and a
workshop on artistic visions of Eels, environmental DNA analyses of
their occurrence, presentations on data siloing among the various
corporations and agencies that affect them, recognition of their
historic importance to First Nations, and hope that improved turbines
which let the adult Eels through, ladder-like arrangements to help the
elvers upstream, co-operation, and general recognition of the wonder of
a single hemispheric population, may lead to recovery.

==============================================

ANGUILLA ROSTRATA

I am a balance of life and death and migration:
n less a billion may not be enough

Are you still watching for me?
Am I still here?

Go down to the sunny spring shore to check
Am I still here?

Go down to the silver autumn sound and check
Am I still here?

Where are the salt marshes and the knothole ponds?
Where has Lake Ontario gone?
Where is Kemptville Creek?
Am I still here?

Eels can live anywhere: even in a canal
Eels can live anywhere: even in sewage
Eels can live anywhere: even in a clearcut
Eels can live anywhere: even in a subdivision
Eels can live anywhere: even in a landfill

I am the eternal bounty of the sea washing up onto your shore.
Pickle me in leachate, smoke me with PCB's;
Do not weep for me:
there will be no mitigation when I am gone.

I will be more invisible than leptocephali when I am gone
Black will be the Sargasso depths when I am gone — black as today.
Clear will be the Atlantic waters — clear as today.

Watch for my death
Watch for my going
Watch for me

Come down to the shore to be sure this spring has come.
As silent as my coming will be the spring when I am gone:
n less a billion may not be enough.

==================================================

FWS, Bishops Mills, 20 November 1990 -
http://www.ecospherics.net/pages/SchuelerAnguilla.html - A Poem:
Anguilla rostrata. 2000. Sea Wind, Bulletin of Ocean Voice
International, 14(3):24