by James Prosek
Once the petition to list is submitted and the government determines that a status review is warranted, it has one year to make a decision about the listing. In the case of the Wattses’ eel petition, eighteen months went by and there was still no word from the government. Tim kept in touch with Heather Bell, the biologist at the USFWS assigned to assemble and write the status review, asking her when they might have a decision. She said she didn’t know. A few more months went by. They had just about given up on getting a response from the government at all. Then, out of the blue, a law firm in Washington, D.C., that specialized in ESA litigation contacted the Watts brothers to take on their eel case, pro bono.
Meyer and Glitzenstein sued the USFWS for its tardiness. That lawsuit dragged out for six months. In January 2007, the USFWS finally promised it would come out with a decision by February.* “If we had not sued them in federal court,” Doug said, “they never would have come out with a decision. There was no need to; why bother?”
On February 2, 2007, the USFWS announced in a thirty-page report, written by Heather Bell, that listing American eels under the Endangered Species Act was “not warranted.”
“While the eel population has declined in some areas,” Bell wrote, “the eel population as a whole shows significant resiliency. If we look at eels over time, we see fluctuations in the population numbers, so a decreasing number of eels right now does not necessarily forecast an irreversible trend. The species’ overall population is not in danger of extinction or likely to become so in the foreseeable future.”
“The conclusion itself is insane!” Doug said. “I’ve read tons of this stuff. This one, I could tell they cooked the books.”
In standard status reviews, they identify all the different things that are negatively affecting the species under investigation, from birth until death. And then, at the end of the report, they consider how all these effects together are contributing to the potential extinction of the species. This is called a cumulative effects analysis. In the USFWS final report, Doug said, they looked at all the factors affecting the eel separately, in isolation, but never considered them together.
“In the real world,” Doug said, “eels are being affected by all this stuff at once—toxics, dams, fishing, habitat degradation. Perhaps climate change, disease—there are even some nasty nematode parasites spreading through the population. What they never did was ask, ‘Might all these factors together be a threat to the continued existence of the freshwater eel? ‘ You know, I read over the thing like ten times, and I said, ‘There’s something missing here.’ ”
A cumulative effects analysis tries to predict what all those problems can do together—as Doug calls it, “death by a thousand paper cuts.” This is routinely addressed in standard reviews, such as those for the Atlantic salmon or the Atlantic sturgeon, and is one of the most basic components of an ecological report. It was also clear to Doug, from the length of the report and the breadth of the research cited, that the government hadn’t done its homework, or didn’t want to.
“The status review for Atlantic salmon was three hundred pages,” Doug said. “The one for eels was thirty.”
Doug called Bell, the author of the eel report, and held her accountable.
“I said to her, ‘This is Ecology 101. If you submitted this as a master’s thesis, you’d fail!’ I said, ‘Heather, do you honestly think you could publish this in the American Fisheries Society Journal? You couldn’t, they’d reject it. You’re putting out an official USFWS legal finding that you know would be rejected in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Would you honestly submit this? ‘ No, she wouldn’t, because an attorney wrote it. It wasn’t a scientific document; it was a legal document. I said to Heather, ‘I know this isn’t you; you’re smart. This is you under duress.’ ”
Besides not having a cumulative effects analysis, the report made an audacious assumption about the life cycle of the freshwater eel that absolved the dams of their effect on the species. The findings basically said that eels don’t need freshwater habitat to survive. Doug threw up his hands in exasperation. “That’s like saying bald eagles don’t need trees to nest in! They can use telephone poles.”
The status review uses a paper written by Katsumi Tsukamoto to support this argument. Katsumi’s paper basically says that yes, eels can complete their full life cycle without entering freshwater, that eels are not a true catadromous fish but have a choice of whether or not to enter freshwater. This behavior is called facultative catadromy.
“The eel is a very plastic species,” Katsumi said. “You can tell by strontium and calcium deposits in the fish whether or not they’ve been in freshwater. And we found that some never go up the rivers.” This phenomenon of eels living in estuarine waters of various salinities was later documented by scientists for all the northern temperate species of eels, including the American eel and also the New Zealand eel.
Time will tell whether eels will be able to adapt to these new conditions. They are certainly resilient and have, after all, survived ice ages, when major parts of their northern freshwater habitats were covered with ice for millennia. There is no arguing, though, that the larger the amount of habitat and rearing area eliminated from the eels’ historic range, the fewer eels there will be.
In fairness to Heather Bell at the USFWS, she did her job thoroughly.
Mike Miller at the Ocean Research Institute in Tokyo argued, “The government under the ESA is not evaluating whether the eel is in severe decline, or in trouble, or getting killed by the millions, they are trying to determine if it is threatened with extinction. Now, that may be more a flaw in the system—that there is no organization taking preemptive measures to protect species in steep decline.”
The USFWS held at least four major workshops that assembled scientific experts from many fields of eel biology and ecology to determine and discuss the present state of knowledge about the American eel. They concluded that there is no evidence of possible extinction. Population size reduction is irrefutable, however. Dams are likely a big factor, but Miller, who was flown to the States by the government to participate in the workshops, told me, “More evidence is building that the problem may be in the ocean. The timing of the decline does not coincide well with the building of most of the dams in North America, but they do coincide better with changes in the ocean atmosphere system, it seems.”
John Casselman’s primary concern was not that eels would become extinct, but something more abstract.
“What I fear,” Casselman said to me, “is not that we’ll lose the eel completely, but that we will lose our association with them. The eel fishery was highly productive for our First Nation people like the Iroquois, and enabled them to survive when all else failed.”
* The St. Lawrence River, which drains the Great Lakes, contains about 17 percent of the freshwater habitat within the range of the North American eel.
* At the March 29, 2004, meeting of the American Eel Management Board of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, Eric Smith, the commission’s Connecticut representative, stated: “I just want to see that the issue doesn’t languish until such time as five years from now, we say, okay, now we’ve got some landings [data] and can deal with it. This thing has been troubling for some time now that you look at the slides.”
* The Maryland Department of Natural Resources MBSS Newsletter, March 1999, states: “The most dramatic example of the decline of American eel abundance is dam construction on the Susquehanna River. Prior to the completion of Conowingo and three other mainstem dams in the 1920s, eels were common throughout the Susquehanna basin and were popular with anglers. To estimate the number of eels lost as a result of construction of Conowingo Dam, we used MBSS data on American eels from the Lower Susquehanna basin and extrapolated it to the rest of the basin above the dam. Our best conservative guess is that there are on the order of 11 million fewer eels in the Susquehanna basin today than in the 1920s.
“Because adult eels migrate to the Sargasso Sea
to spawn and die-transporting their accumulated biomass and nutrient load out of Chesapeake Bay-the loss of eels has increased nutrient loads in the basin and reduced them in the open ocean where they are more appreciated.”
* Edward Howe Forebush wrote in the early 1900s in A History of the Game Birds, Wild-Fowl and Shore Birds of Massachusetts and Adjacent States, “No adequate attempt to protect them [the passenger pigeon] was made until they practically had disappeared. Whenever a law looking toward the conservation of these birds was proposed in any State, its opponents argued before the legislative committees that the Pigeons ‘needed no protection;’ that their numbers were so vast, and that they ranged over such a great extent of country, that they were simply able to take care of themselves. This argument defeated all measures that might have given adequate protection to this species. That is why extinction finally came quickly. We did our best to exterminate both old and young, and we succeeded.”
* The law firm’s pro bono work for the Watts brothers was eventually paid for by the U.S. government when it was determined that USFWS was in default of its legal responsibility.
chapter eleven
STILL IN THE
Hunt
The eel
Curiosity will never be content. Even today, when we know so much, curiosity has not unravelled the riddle of the birth and sex life of the eel. Perhaps these are things, like many others, destined never to be learnt before the world comes to an end. Or perhaps—but here I speculate, here my own curiosity leads me by the nose—the world is so arranged that when all things are learnt, when curiosity is exhausted (so, long live curiosity), that is when the world shall have come to its end. But even if we learn how, and what and where and when, will we ever know why? Why, why?
— GRAHAM SWIFT, WATERLAND
In the fall of 2008, tying up the loose ends of this book, I e-mailed Mike Miller at the Ocean Research Institute in Tokyo to ask a few last questions. Mike said he had some big news but could not share it until the official press release had gone out to the Japanese media. I had a feeling what his news might be, and though I didn’t know the details, there was really nothing else it could be: they had found them.
Some weeks later Mike told me that a vessel operated by the Japanese Fisheries Research Agency had, for the first time, caught adult specimens of a catadromous eel on the spawning grounds. The vessel had netted single adult males of both the Japanese eel and the giant mottled eel, Anguilla marmorata, and two female specimens of Anguilla japonica in professional fisheries’ trawling nets not far from the area where he and Katsumi Tsukamoto had captured the smallest newborn eel larvae to the west of Guam. “The discovery,” Mike wrote me in an e-mail, “was not that glamorous,” in part because the eels caught had completed their spawning, and were flaccid and nearly dead, except for one male Anguilla marmorata that was still alive enough to swim in a tank on board for a while.
“But adults have finally been caught in the ocean, at least,” he added with little fanfare.
I called Mike early one morning in Tokyo to get a read on what the summer discovery might actually mean to him and his colleagues. I told him that I had feared this moment. Mike downplayed the discovery.
“Finding the adults doesn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know,” he said. “The mystery is still there. We still don’t know how they do it. We don’t know how many there are, whether they arrive at once or spawn in stages. We don’t know exactly where they do it.” As he explained, the eels caught had spawned days before and possibly drifted a good distance from the spawning area. “And we haven’t seen them doing it.”
But with each year, researchers peer more into the hidden lives of eels. The Europeans are accelerating their eel tagging projects, just as they are facing an alarming crash in the return of juvenile eels to their rivers. In the autumn of 2006 and again in 2008, scientists released adult eels from the west coast of Ireland outfitted with pop-up tags to try to track them out to the Sargasso Sea.
“Do you think they’ll find them?” I asked Mike.
“Well,” he said matter-of-factly, “there’s nothing really to find. We know where they spawn. That’s not a big question.”*
I asked why the Fisheries Research Agency of Japan had spent so much money to find the Japanese eels. What value was it to them?
“The agency wanted to know about the spawning ecology, where the eels spawn exactly, and how many are spawning,” Mike said. “They sold it from a fisheries management perspective. But basically they were just cowboys wanting to get out there and see if they could catch them.” Finding them did not add much to our scientific knowledge of this fish, Mike suggested, nor did it take anything away from the magnificence of their life history.
“Such a long migration as that made by the European eel and other catadromous eels is rare among fishes,” Mike mused. “It’s incredible. I mean, giant tuna move around the globe pretty far, too, and come back to spawning areas, but they’re not coming from freshwater and doing it. And there’s very few species that migrate that far just once in their lives and then die.”
Mike thinks the position of the spawning area is imprinted on the eel larvae when they’re born, by some geomagnetic map sense.
“It has been proven that eels have a magnetic sense,” Mike said. “And I hypothesize that the reason they have that magnetic sense is to find the general spawning area. Once they get near it, perhaps temperature, salinity, and the smell of each other come into play, and they begin to aggregate. Of course,” he added, “this is all speculation. But it’s hard to imagine anything else, really. So that’s a mystery. How the heck do they do that?”
“Is that what you think about when you wake up in the middle of the night?” I asked Mike. “Is that the burning question for you? How they get there?”
“The mysteries I think about every day,” Mike said, “are concerned with finding the spawning areas of other species of Anguilla—in the South Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the Indonesian seas. Katsumi and I are going back to the Indian Ocean next year and the Indonesian seas after that. There are at least two big cruises on the schedule and more planned. We’ve got the ship time lined up, so we’re going to go for it. We’re still in the hunt.”
Everyone likes a good treasure hunt. The eel quest requires big toys, major outlays for fuel, a crew, and a staff of scientists. It’s a floating community of data collection. But out at sea, Mike says, the purpose of data collection blurs into doubts and uncertainties. With the eel, Mike and his colleagues have found that intuition and spirituality have braided with the science. One of his favorite stories involves his cruise with Katsumi in 1991, when they first discovered the spawning area of the Japanese eel. They were coming up on the last day of the cruise and had captured no eel larvae. So far the expedition had been a bust. Spirits were low. That night they would make their last pull of the net before heading back.
On the afternoon before that last evening, one of the staff aboard ship conducted an official tea ceremony, being trained and certified in that cultural skill. That evening good fortune came to their nets when they caught not one or two but hundreds of transparent leaf-shaped baby eels, indicating that they were in the vicinity of where adults had spawned. Mike and members of the crew refer to that evening as “magical.” They willingly attribute their catch to the spiritual focus provided by the ritual of the tea served by their colleague in a kimono.
“Do you think eels are a spiritual fish?” I asked Mike.
“I’m at my scientific table,” he said, laughing. “We might get into that another time. It’s not as simple as what people might think.”
That’s clear. It is hard to evaluate personal experience scientifically. Science is a system to collect and interpret tractable information; obviously, questions related to spiritual issues or personal experience cannot be easily traced and quantified. “A lot of scientists ignore personal experience altogether,” Mike said, “largely because it can’t be measured. That�
�s not necessarily a mistake if you’re doing science. But if you’re trying to evaluate life on earth, it probably is.”
If you collect information about personal experiences—if you record and interpret the many regenerated stories and recantations—the evidence supports a picture of a far more complex universe.
If an indigenous Pohnpeian tells me he’s seen eels come out of the water and dance in the street on the day before the high chief of his clan dies, or that eels can climb up a tree to take the egg of a fairy tern, who am I to say that doesn’t happen? Some might say, “Well, that’s not possible.” I’ve come to believe in a system of the universe that can include many things—among them nonphysical existence.
For me, the truth of the indigenous stories is of no importance. The fact that they exist is. And if they exist in myriad forms in different cultures, that speaks to something essential that I suspect is vitally important to heed. Preserving diversity of fishes or any other type of creature around the world is about preserving the sources of our awe and inspiration. If we lose the creatures that form the foundation of our spiritual systems, if we lose those things that inspire us to be spiritual at all, then we will be lost.
We’ve been given the gift of inquisitiveness, the capacity to reflect on our own emotions, to create, to imagine. But that gift must be sustained. It can be fed by interpretations of nature already imagined, by books and paintings, by skins and bones of dead animals in natural history museums. But if we can, why not preserve the source as well, to allow people to drink from the original wellspring?
The eel is timeless and vital, a metaphor for the resilience of life itself. To paraphrase what Katsumi wrote in his poem about the eel: Why live, why die? Why do we do these kinds of things? Why do we choose this hard life? Because we have absolutely no choice but to be productive, to be optimistic, to take one step forward, to survive. It’s all part of the experience of being alive. To many, Ray Turner—the river rat, the old hair bag—would appear to have a hard life, a lonely life. But to learn about him is to admire him and understand his creed: “Work is a privilege of life.” It’s the eel in all of us—their relentlessness, as DJ, the Maori bush guide, describes it. Despite the trials, the obstacles, the dams, the diversions, we still make our journeys from birth to death, like the restless traveler, the eel.