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Citizen complaint of the day: Dead eels in Dorchester
By adamg on Sat, 02/22/2020 - 9:58pm
A concerned citizen filed a 311 complaint about dead eels among the rocks by the Morrissey Boulevard drawbridge:
Was walking yesterday by the beach by Morrissey near the bridge / yacht club. There were at least 20 dead eels. Didn't know if there was some kind of water hazard.
The complaint includes a photo of some of the dead eels, in case you need to know what they look like.
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Comments
My hovercraft
Is full of eels.
Ahh, matches!
n/t
Perhaps...
they weren't licensed to eel
or...
maybe they had been feeling eel
I wonder
Do you think the person manning the 311 account got a bit of a sniggle out of this report?
Deep cut
Well done.
File under
Eel be seeing you!
I am not a number
I am a free eel!
Here's how the follow up will go
311 complaint about mob of loud noisy seagulls
311 closes both complaints ... no eels, no seagulls found.
Eels
They live in fresh water and spawn
in salt water, the opposite behavior from what most
people know as “migratory.”
That would be...
catadromous, as opposed to anadromous ( /showoff )
Why
is that the opposite of migratory? It's a migration; the direction of the migration is irrelevant.
Usually the word refers to species or persons that migrate seasonally or periodically, so it wouldn't really apply in either case.
Eels don’t live in salt water
Eels don’t live in salt water?
Life cycle
Eels are born in the Sargasso Sea in the middle of the Atlantic. As elvers they swim into fresh water, often far inland, and live their lives there. When they are ready to reproduce, they swim back to the Sargasso Sea, do so, and die.
There are other fish that live in the sea that are called eels - Morays, sand eels, congers, etc. - but the most familiar eel, the freshwater eel, is catadromous, as described.
Well I’ll be darned. All the
Well I’ll be darned. All the eels I have caught have been in salt or brackish water. Thank you for the info.
Some
of these "freswater" eels only make it as far as brackish water before they settle down, and end up spending their lives in estuaries and salt marshes. Slackers. I imagine it's them you've been catching.
One more amazing detail about this peculiar lifecycle is that there are two species of freshwater eel that spawn in the Sargasso Sea, the American Eel and the European Eel. The American Eels go west, and the European Eels go east. Must be a hell of a traffic jam.
Eeling is good business in Maine also
https://www.npr.org/2018/04/21/604551231/in-maine-its-a-boom-year-when-i...
"There's dead eels under our
"There's dead eels under our drawbridge!"
[best Frank Nelson waiter voice]:"Oooh! Don't let the other neighborhoods hear you got dead eels, sir - Lower Mills and Charlestown will want them under their drawbridges, too!"