Eel-evated Efforts – How Santee Cooper is Helping the American Eel.

Eel-evated Efforts â€" How Santee Cooper is Helping the American Eel.

Posted on September 10, 2024 by Jeff Straight

Santee Cooper's Biological Services team has an important job maintaining our lakes. One example is their innovative way of controlling the invasive fern, giant salvinia. As important as it is to keep invasive species out, it's equally as important to propagate those that are native. An initiative is currently underway to do just that for our American eels.

While many species of fish are anadromous, meaning they spawn in freshwater and mature in the ocean, American eels are catadromous, which means the opposite. These unique animals are hatched in the ocean, migrate upstream as juveniles, and remain in freshwater until sexual maturity. Once they mature, they travel sometimes thousands of miles to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean to spawn in a region called the Sargasso Sea.

Unfortunately, their populations have declined due to several reasons including habitat loss, overfishing and barriers to their migration. That's where Santee Cooper comes in.

"Although our dams and hydro stations provide many benefits to the region, they have impacted a variety of migratory fish populations, including the American eel," said Senior Environmental Specialist Carl Bussells.

Early in 2023, Santee Cooper was issued a new FERC license, which requires an assortment of fisheries studies. The American eel is benefitting from this as we are conducting a two-year study to determine the most effective location to capture juveniles below the dam so they can be passed upstream into Lake Moultrie. A permanent eel ramp will be installed in the area where the most eels are caught.

The process is a group effort and our Construction Services team members were brought in to design and build some traps. These consist of a floating barge that supports an I-beam coated in a material called "EnkaMat." This material provides a surface that allows the eels to easily climb the beam into a bucket of recirculating water where they can't escape. To lure the eels toward the barges, the Electrical Maintenance crew at Jefferies Hydroelectric Generating Station created submerged pumps for three of the barges and a gravity-fed siphon for the other.

"The traps will capture juvenile eels (between 2.5" and 3.5") that are attempting to migrate upstream to find suitable habitat to grow, typically over the next six to 13 years, before they migrate downstream and out to the Atlantic Ocean," said Bussells.

The traps below Pinopolis Dam have been in operation since July 31 and are expected to potentially capture thousands of eels per day during the height of the migration period. To simplify the process, the first 50 eels will be measured and individually weighed. After that, the remaining eels can be extrapolated based on the average weight of the first 50 eels.

The Santee Cooper Lakes are an invaluable resource - not just for the people of South Carolina, but the flora and fauna as well. Maintaining them is another example of how Santee Cooper is committed to its mission to be the state's leading resource for improving the quality of life for the people of South Carolina.

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