ANNOUNCER: This program is made by MPT to enrich the diverse communities throughout our state and is made possible by the generous support of our members.

Thank you.

NARRATOR: Coming up... A sculptor weaves nature's struggles into art... And... BIOLOGIST: They're not snakes, they're fish.

NARRATOR: The secrets of the American eel.

Next.

Outdoors Maryland is produced in cooperation with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.

(upbeat music) ♪♪ ♪♪ [Jazz music plays on the radio] DAVID BACHARACH: When I drive around, just on a day-to-day basis, people throw things out of their car.

Occasionally, what people throw out is an interesting piece of metal, or an interesting piece of stone or concrete or whatever, and I might pick up a very small piece of rusted material that I just found fascinating.

But it's- it's not like you're going out looking for the trash.

It's just there.

NARRATOR: On a cool fall day, a group of eager volunteers gathers at Irvine Nature Center in Baltimore County.

DAVID: Oh, what's your name?

CHRISTIAN: Christian, I'm Christian.

DAVID: Christian, nice to meet you Christian.

NARRATOR: Where artist David Bacharach is overseeing the ground-breaking of an unusual installation.

He calls it, The Mounds.

DAVID: At Irvine, we're going to be doing three sculptures.

One sculpture will represent land.

One sculpture will represent air.

One sculpture will represent water.

NARRATOR: Each, a work of land art evoking mankind's legacy of environmental exploitation.

DAVID: What we're doing first is we're preparing the site where the project's going to go.

This was also a dumping site.

We're getting rid of the cinder blocks and the construction material, and trying to just generally clean it up and make it safe to work in.

NARRATOR: They're also removing invasive species like bittersweet and Japanese honeysuckle and with the help of local arborist Frank Dudek, this Paulownia.

FRANK DUDEK: You don't want to have Paulownias just taking over this whole nature center because it's not a native tree.

It doesn't belong here.

DAVID: Are they going to take some off the top first or are they just going to let it drop?

FRANK: We're going to notch it and fell the whole tree right there.

DAVID: Alright.

NARRATOR: For Irvine's natural resources manager Kyle Gillen, it's good riddance.

KYLE GILLEN: I'm so excited to get rid of this tree finally.

It's been taunting me for a while.

DAVID: I would say to Kyle, can we take this tree, can we take?

And you would say, are you kidding?

Get rid of all of them!

KYLE: When you compare something like a native white oak that hosts like 500 something insect species, compared to Paulownia, which can maybe host five or six species.

So a lot of it comes down to how many insects can a single species of tree host?

You know the more insects you have, the more food that the birds have.

So this tree is really just occupying space that could be more productive for our native environment.

DAVID: This becomes material for my art, because these are the invasives that I want to make the mounds from.

NARRATOR: Known best for his signature woven copper baskets and sculptures, David has been creating work at his studio outside Baltimore for decades.

DAVID: I did not consciously connect my work with nature and the environment until about the early 80s.

Even though I had done sculptures of birds and cattails and flowers and things like that, I had chosen them just because they seemed like an interesting subject.

But I wasn't trying to address a specific issue.

In the early 80's, I did a whole series of Endangered Species sculptures, and that was my first foray into a direct connection between what was happening environmentally and my own work.

The more I researched a particular bird or a particular animal, the issue of the environmental crisis kept popping up.

DAVID: If you're interested in the birds and the animals and the insects, you, you almost can't avoid it.

To the point where I felt like I was wasting my time if I didn't start addressing the environmental issues more directly.

NARRATOR: The Mounds are his largest work yet and his most ephemeral, thanks to his palette of materials pulled from the landscape itself.

DAVID: This entire project, which is three separate sculptures are all based on a technique called Hugel Mounds.

It's a European technique that's been around for generations, where you pile wood and brush and let it decompose.

And in three or four years, you have fresh soil.

What we're doing here is we're using that technique, but we're going to use it to create a piece of art.

What I'm doing here specifically is trying to weave the branches of these pieces in as tightly as possible, so that I get as tight a nest of material as possible, so that it's nice and firm.

♪♪ DAVID: This sculpture is influenced by the greenhouse gas issue.

It's got quite a ways to go but most of the trunks in the base are Tree of Heaven and what's interesting about it is that you can chop the Tree of Heaven down but that won't stop it from growing.

And the idea that here was this thing that we've introduced just like excess greenhouse gas, that's hurting us and that we have basically lost control over, I thought was a perfect analogy to use as the basis of this of this piece.

NARRATOR: Beyond the biodegradable, David is also weaving in materials that won't decompose, at least, not for hundreds of years.

a nod to the global accumulation of so-called "forever plastics" polluting waterways like the Chesapeake Bay.

DAVID: This is the netting that I'm going to use on the mounds that represent water, because we are choking our oceans with plastic that we've created and need to do something about.

And this kind of basket-like form that's now attached to this net is like a tumor, because that's how I feel when I look at the pictures of plastic garbage patch that we've created in the Pacific Ocean.

And so, I'm going to create a series of these nets that will all be interwoven when we put them in place on the mounds that represent water.

And they will all have these tumors made of waste material, waste metal, waste plastic that I picked up off the floor of various places, and nets and these these cargo nets that were used and being discarded.

NARRATOR: On a chilly April morning after months of designing, clearing, piling and weaving.

The Mounds are finally open to the Public.

Land.

With woven paths, pushes you forward.

Air, lifts your gaze to the sky.

Water, winding us a reminder of all that's been left behind.

And as the first visitors weave their own way through these curious constructions, David contemplates the sense of loss reflected in their unconventional beauty.

DAVID: I have lived with this project now for almost a year and spent a great deal of time reading about environmental problems and the enormity of the task in front of humanity to correct what's going on is- is mind boggling.

DAVID: We've destroyed, whether intentionally or not, by logging and tilling and draining and grazing and paving and development.

Why the hell would we do that?

Why would you destroy and make uninhabitable the land that you want to live on and raise your kids on and hopefully your kid's kids to grow on?

Why would you do that?

It doesn't make any sense.

NARRATOR: It's one of the planet's most mysterious and misunderstood fish.

WILLIAM HARBOLD: Some people seem to be afraid of eels, similarly to how some people are afraid of snakes.

Some people think that eels are snakes, but they're not snakes, they're fish.

NARRATOR: No one knows exactly where the life of the elusive American eel begins, but it's thought to spawn in the Sargasso Sea.

Known for the infamous Bermuda Triangle, and for masses of free-floating seaweed, sargassum.

From the Sargasso, an eel might migrate thousands of miles in its lifetime, choosing from a vast stretch of Atlantic coastline that reaches as far south as Venezuela and as far north as Greenland.

It may settle in a brackish coastal bay or a muddy creek.

KEITH WHITEFORD: They basically occupy habitat from open ocean all the way up to freshwater streams, lakes, the estuary.

And they're an important part of the food web in every one of those habitats.

NARRATOR: At the end of their lives, mature eels known as silver eels migrate back to the Sargasso Sea to die but not before using the last of their energy to reproduce.

KEITH: There's more to their story than just being snakelike and slimy.

NARRATOR: Emerging from the Sargasso, eel larvae, called leptocephali float on ocean currents for about a year.

As they approach land, they begin to swim on their own.

These translucent "glass eels" are most active at night, moving away from the brine of the ocean, towards freshwater.

KEITH: We're at Turville Creek, which is a little creek that dumps into the Isle of Wright Bay, near Ocean City.

NARRATOR: For eight weeks each spring, Keith Whiteford, a biologist with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, traps these young eels in order to estimate how many have made their way to Maryland's coastal bays.

KEITH: We don't know much about the spawning population, but we do know, like once they spawn, these glass eels are juveniles.

They are less than a year old.

So you can look at, you know, possibly make that jump to say, you know, look at their reproductive success of those silver eels.

So tracking those glass eels is crucial to kind of getting information on the spawning population.

Ok so, the trap has freshwater that is running through the trap.

There's, it's gravity fed.

Basically it's just a siphon above the dam that's 100 percent freshwater.

So we're providing freshwater into the trap, ...it fills the back of the trap.

There's a little well, and then there's a ramp that goes to the front of the trap.

NARRATOR: Eels crawl up the ramp in search of a freshwater habitat, instead finding themselves in the trap.

KEITH: So we did catch a few.

Not a huge catch, but we have some.

NARRATOR: Keith estimates he's caught about 1100 eels.

KEITH: We've caught up to 300,000 eels in this trap over the course of 8 weeks.

The fact that this little trap, this little wooden box with a, you know, a foot entrance actually can catch up to 300,000 is pretty remarkable.

So it tells you the magnitude of how many glass eels are entering in this system.

NARRATOR: Keith brings a few eels back to the lab.

They get a little anesthetic so he can weigh and measure them.

He also takes a note of each one's color.

The more pigment, the older it is.

KEITH: These are glass eels, but they will transition into elvers, and the elvers are fully pigmented; it's their next life stage.

So now we have the subsample of eels, they're all awake doing really well, and we're going to release them back, actually release them in the middle of Chesapeake Bay.

Some will live out their lives here.

Others will move on, snaking their way up rivers and streams in search of a permanent home.

WILLIAM: My name is William Harbold.

I work with Maryland Department of Natural Resources, and have been working with eels here on the Patapsco River for 13 years.

These young pigmented eels, or elvers, as they're called, are moving upstream through the Patapsco River, or any river that they find themselves in, looking for suitable habitat to live and grow and spend the majority of their adult life, which may be anywhere from 10 to 15, 20 even 30 years.

NARRATOR: The elvers' upstream migration isn't easy.

Predators abound.

And there are plenty of barriers.

WILLIAM: We're here at Daniels Dam on the Patapsco River, looking at an eel ladder that Maryland DNR constructed to help American eels migrate upstream beyond the dam.

An eel ladder is basically a ramp that goes down the face of a dam and allows a pathway for eels to climb up and over that dam.

They climb up the dam, up the ladder to get past the dam using this substrate that provides a good texture for eels to wiggle and worm their way through.

They're climbing more like a snake than like a fish swimming.

NARRATOR: Fresh water trickles down the ladder.

It attracts the eels, and keeps them wet, allowing them to breathe during their climb.

WILLIAM: It's a tough journey to climb all the way up, up this, to get past the dam, but these eels were spawned in the Sargasso Sea out near Bermuda, so they've had a tough journey to get here to begin with.

So really, this is just one more small hurdle.

NARRATOR: There's a movement to remove some of these hurdles altogether.

Dams don't just obstruct eel passage, they impact other migratory fish too, like shad and herring.

[Loud blast] In 2018, the state demolished the long inactive Bloede dam, located a few miles downstream from Daniels.

Bloede became the third dam to be removed from the Patapsco river since 2010.

WILLIAM: For the five years prior to Bloede dam being removed downstream of this dam, we were seeing an average of 28 eels per year.

The numbers of eels began to increase at Daniels Dam after Bloede was removed.

In 2019 They almost doubled to about 50 eels in that first year.

In 2020 it went to about 360 eels, in 2021 it was 3400 eels.

NARRATOR: And by 2023, the ladder aided the passage of about 39,000 eels.

WILLIAM: It's been orders of magnitude in increases almost each year since Bloede dam came out downstream.

NARRATOR: William and DNR are also interested in how removing Bloede Dam has affected the Patapsco river's adult eels, known as yellow eels.

More than half of the country's commercial yellow eel harvest once came from the Chesapeake Bay.

But the fish's population has been declining for decades, driven by factors like dams, overfishing, water quality and disease.

WILLIAM: We're here on the Patapsco River near Elkridge, Maryland and we're about to do an electrofishing survey for American eels.

So the electrofisher is the backpack that they're wearing over there.

It's a device with a battery in it that puts an electric current into the water.

It makes their muscles contract and immobilizes them and that makes them easy to scoop up with a net.

It's temporary, it doesn't kill the fish, but it immobilizes them long enough to collect them with a net and put them in a bucket.

We picked this survey spot because it's one of several that are downstream of Bloede dam, and we have a mixture of sites above and below the dam to see how numbers of eels below the dam versus numbers of eels above the dam changed when the dam came out.

NARRATOR: William and his team concentrate their efforts under rocks and roots, where their slippery subjects are most likely to hide.

WILLIAM: We've collected four eels so far and I think three other species of fish.

NARRATOR: These yellow eels will stay here for the rest of their adult lives.

As they mature, they'll develop into males or females.

WILLIAM: It went well at this site, we got a total of 19 eels.

So now we're done with those, so we're just going to let them go.

NARRATOR: Not all dams can be removed.

Completed in 1928, Conowingo Dam generates enough electricity to power 160,000 homes.

It's Maryland's largest source of renewable energy, situated on the Chesapeake Bay's biggest tributary: the 444-mile Susquehanna river.

AARON HENNING: The American eel has been absent from the Susquehanna River basin since the construction of the large mainstem dams in the teens and 20's.

Upstream migration was essentially cut off for American eels.

NARRATOR: Aaron Henning works with the Susquehanna River Basin Commission, one of the many natural resource agencies working with the dam's owner, Constellation Energy, to bring eels back to the upper reaches of the river.

AARON: They're a native species.

They're a keystone species.

They're a host species for a lot of native freshwater mussels that are important for filtering the water and improving water quality.

NARRATOR: But helping them circumnavigate a 94-foot dam calls for a ladder larger and more sophisticated than the one at Daniels.

Mike Martinek works for the environmental consulting firm Normandeau.

He and his team manage the day-to-day operations of the ladder.

MIKE NORMANDEAU: Looking good.

Looks like we're probably gonna be a couple thousand eels today, NARRATOR: Mike and his team collect and count these determined elvers seven days a week, May through November.

Year to year the numbers vary but since the ladder was installed in 2017, they've seen as many as 620,000 eels in a single season.

MIKE: These eels, they look like an earthworm, They want to be eaten by everything.

NARRATOR: A cover on the ramp and a shade cloth over the rip rap offer protection from ever-present avian predators.

MIKE: That cover on the ramp is also to keep it dark in the ramp.

Eels like to pass during new moon.

New moon there's not much daylight.

NARRATOR: The collection tank is monitored around the clock.

If the dissolved oxygen or temperature drop below a certain level, employees at the plant receive an alert.

After the eels are counted, it's time to take them upstream.

MIKE: This transport tank is 25,000 eel capacity.

It's about a 700 gallon tank.

NARRATOR: Conowingo is the first of four hydroelectric dams on the Susquehanna River, and the only one with an eel ladder.

MIKE: So to help the recruitment of eels and to get them in the best possible areas for the mussels is to be above all the hydros.

NARRATOR: Typically, that's up near Harrisburg.

Most of today's eels are set free just across the river from Three Mile Island.

But a handful of them have been given a special assignment: ambassador.

AARON: Today we are dropping off American eel elvers for our eels in the classroom project.

NARRATOR: It's the first day of school at North Harford High in Harford County.

LAURA O'LEARY: Here are the eels guys!

AARON: Got some eels.

NARRATOR: Laura O'Leary's environmental science classroom is one of fifty in the Susquehanna River Basin that will raise elvers throughout the school year.

STUDENT: So they're trying to climb up; how high can they climb up?

AARON: They can go about their body length.

We do it just to increase awareness about American eel.

We're in the middle of a restoration program for a native fish species, and it's important to let people know about it and learn about it and understand why we're doing it.

NARRATOR: The restoration appears to be working.

Since the mid 2000's, 2 million eels have been released above Conowingo Dam.

AARON: I received reports from every corner of the basin.

They've made it all the way up to Cooperstown, New York, to the functional start of the river.

They're throughout New York, Pennsylvania and certainly Maryland.

NARRATOR: Sheila Eyler, a biologist with the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service, also works with Constellation Energy to protect eels, but her focus is on mature "silver eels."

SHEILA EYLER: We've tagged over 200 silver eels.

So these are eels that are ready to migrate.

And we've found that they do pass the hydropower plants.

Some don't make it through successfully, most of the time when they do pass the hydropower plants, they have to go through turbines to get downstream.

So those are big propellers, and as those propellers spin, the eels sometimes get hit by those propellers and don't survive.

So some eels do get out successfully and some don't.

NARRATOR: As an eel approaches the end of its life, its body begins to prepare for the long migration from its freshwater home, back to the Sargasso Sea.

Its color changes, and muscle mass increases.

Its eyes get larger, to help it see in darker water.

It stops eating, living off fat stores.

Its only focus is to spawn.

As for what happens next, we can only guess with the hope that someday we might be privy to more secrets of the American eel.

♪♪ NARRATOR: To stream episodes of Outdoors Maryland , visit mpt.org and don't forget to follow us on social media.

(owl hoots) Learn more about Maryland's diverse natural resources at dnr.maryland.gov, or download the official mobile app.

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