Like the animals they seek, members of the VIMS' American Eel Monitoring Survey team team spend a lot of spring days struggling through muck and climbing over obstacles. Their quest is to count the young eels now migrating into Virginia's estuaries and freshwater lakes and ponds. The mandate calls for Atlantic coast states to monitor the recruitment of juvenile eels from the ocean into estuaries. Those declines are clearly evident in data collected by the VIMS Trawl Survey Team, which has been recording the abundance of adult eels in Virginia's waters since 1955. From a distance it appears the wall is moving.
American eels are catadromous - meaning they live their life in freshwater but breed in the ocean.
They thus reverse the life cycle of anadromous fishes such as striped bass and salmon that live in the ocean but return to freshwater to spawn. Life cycle of the American eel entering Virgina waters. The eel's life cycle is complex. Immature eels inhabit fresh and brackish coastal waters from North America to Greenland and range inland as far as the Mississippi and Great Lakes drainages. They spawn during the winter to early spring in the Sargasso Sea - a vast eddy in the Atlantic Ocean near Bermuda.