(NY) Newsday – The American eel has for millennia carried out a remarkable survival saga, swimming thousands of miles of ocean to reach Lake Ontario, where it matures the swims back to its ocean birthplace to spawn and die.
But after 125 million years, the eel is struggling to run the gauntlet that humans have thrown in its way and is vanishing from the St. Lawrence River-Lake Ontario system, say New York and Canadian scientists.
Scientists estimate when the Onondaga Indians fished the lake centuries ago, there were up to 60 million eels thriving in the Lake Ontario system. As recently as the 1980s, the American eel population in Lake Ontario topped 10 million eels, according to harvest studies. Today, its numbers are in the tens of thousands _ and each year fewer and fewer eels return. More