March 9, 2016 — DOVER — The American eel would seem one of the slipperiest species on which to get a population handle, but a new DNREC YouTube Channel video shows otherwise — with Division of Fish & Wildlife biologists conducting a survey of young “glass eels” tallied thousands at a time by “enumerating them volumetrically” with a device known as a splitter box.
On a single splitter capture, as DNREC’s YouTube Channel documented the effort, more than 7,000 eels were counted — which fisheries biologist Jordan Zimmerman said indicated a good abundance of American eels in the Delaware Estuary (a survey day earlier this year turned up 65,000 glass eels, while another day’s count in a recent year reached almost 100,000).
The glass eel count program was established as a fisheries management plan tool for monitoring reproduction in the American eel. “Glass eels” are another stage of the American eel’s life cycle, first stage being the egg, which hatches into larvae drifting on the Gulf Stream and eventually metamorphosing to the glass eel stage and swimming toward shore and the estuaries.