My Story of the American Eel
I never thought much about eels until 2021 when I received an Ottawa Riverkeeper appeal to save the American eel. The American eel had experienced a population decline of 99% attributed to the poorly designed hydroelectric dams that block eel movement throughout the river system, and the cumulative impacts of other factors, including over-fishing, pollution, disease, and climactic impacts throughout their range. I was shocked to learn that a keystone species was facing extinction in my own backyard. (1)
Most people don’t know much about the American eel. They may confuse it with the parasitic sea lampreys, native to the Atlantic Ocean, which are an invasive species in the Great Lakes. If they have encountered an American eel, its snake-like appearance and slimy skin can evoke biophobic feelings. In my youth, when American eels were apparently the most abundant fish in the Ottawa River watershed, I never actually saw one. I do remember uncanny sensations of a brushing on the leg while swimming in the river. Was it a weed or a stealthy eel? Talking about eels always evoked nervous giggles, shivers, and a big yuck factor!
I decided to learn more about the enigmatic American eel before they totally disappeared. Anguillids are very interesting animals. They are catadromous fish, i.e., they spend their adult lives in freshwater and migrate to the ocean to spawn and die. This is opposite to anadromous fish, such as salmon, that migrate from salt water to freshwater to spawn. The diagram shows overlapping ranges of the American eel and its sister species, the European eel, which both breed in the Sargasso Sea, far from the freshwater where eels with spend their lives.
Mature eels lay their eggs hundreds of metres deep, then die. The Leptocephalus larvae emerge and float on currents in the Atlantic Ocean. The American eel larvae head west while the European eel larvae head east for their much longer journey to Europe. After months of floating, they develop into almost transparent glass eels that then swim towards the coasts. As they approach freshwater they take on colour as they transform into the elver stage. Some immature eels will remain in brackish water. The remainder, now in the yellow eel stage, move up rivers, into lakes, streams, ponds and wetlands. Once they select a home they will remain there for a decade or more, feeding on small animals, crustaceans and insects, growing to a metre or more in length. Sexual maturity brings dramatic changes as the eel enters the silver eel stage — it is only at maturity that sexual organs differentiate. The now fully mature females head down stream on their treacherous reproductive migration back to the Sargasso Sea. Meanwhile, eels in brackish water mature into mainly males that also head to the Sargasso. Deep in the subtropical water, they meet, spawn and die.
Presence and Absence in Art and Ecology
In art, presence and absence are not opposing binaries but intertwine to create a wide range of emotions, meanings, and artistic experiences. Absence in art has many tropes, such as blank and negative space, silhouettes or ghostly shapes or lines, which convey that which is no longer present, lost, disappeared, omitted, or erased. Other tropes, such as an empty room or chair or a vacant landscape can hint at something that was present but is now absent, with possibilities that it might be present again. (2)
Absence and presence are also important in ecology. Species data is based on sampling methodologies that involve the collection of “presence” and “absence” data at a certain place at a certain moment in time. Dolly Jørgensen describes “how the presence of an absence (no known animals) became understood over time as an absence of presence (extinction) through narrative.” Analysing the histories of sitings over time eventually builds an “acceptance of presence of absence [i.e., no sitings] as a sign for absence of presence [likely extinction].” (3)
Since 2021 I have woven a story of the decline of the American eels, from abundant presence, to an absence of presence, which may foreshadow pending presence of absence – extinction. Although scientists are monitoring changes in eel population, I wonder why the disappearance of the American eel is going unnoticed, unprotested, and unmourned by Canadians. We can only detect that absence if we have awareness of presence in the first place. In most of my eel work I try to show the presence of these amazing and enigmatic animals, imagining what was/ could be rather than picturing the current absence in most of its freshwater range in Eastern Noth America.
In the Absence of eels is one of the stories that will be told in Migration Stories, an exhibition by six Ottawa-Gatineau printmakers at the Trinity Art Gallery, Shenkman Arts Centre, this summer.
My Eel Prints in the MIGRATION STORIES Exhibition
Window Eels (Installation, 2025)
Window Eels is a site-specific installation made for the Trinity Gallery Exhibiton. Large eels in shades of teal greens, blues and blacks appear to swim freely across the gallery window. These diaphanous eels float like ghosts across the window – their very presence anticipating their pending absence.
To make them, I cut four shaped plates from large existing collagraphic plates. I used both sides to print multiple copies of each onto rice paper. Once dry, the eel images were cut out. Some were pasted together while others are single layers.
All Caught Up I & II (2022)
In early 2022, I used eels as subjects for two monotype prints. All Caught Up refers to eels captured in a net or basket, which makes a striking image in black and white.
Since time immemorial, eels have been harvested on both sides of the Atlantic — their rich flesh a dietary staple. Traditional eeling survived for centuries. Commercial harvesting of glass eels and elvers, primarily for aquaculture, and fishing for yellow and silver eels continues. Although no longer popular in North American cuisine, eel is still important in Britain, other European countries, and Asia, especially Japan. Despite being controlled, rivalries between indigenous and local fishers and the involvement of international cartels and organized crime seriously threaten the survival of American eels. (4)
Making it to the Red List Triptych (2022)
Because of a sharp decline in adult eel populations, the American Eel is classified as “endangered” and the European Eel as a “critically endangered species” according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Although both Canada and Ontario already recognize the American eel as “threatened” and “endangered,” respectively, no global treaties or conventions are in place to protect them. (5)
Making it to the Red List Triptych uses a single drypoint plate printed in three strong colors to portray the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species categories — “least concern” in green, “threatened” in yellow, and “endangered” in red.
Yellow Eels Diptych (2022)
The multicoloured-monotype diptych imagines abundant yellow eels moving up river at the Deschênes Rapids.
For millennia, yellow eels have made their way up river past natural rapids and waterfalls into the high reaches of the Ottawa River watershed. Since the turn of the 20th century, over 50 dams and electrical plants have been built. Not surprisingly, populations of eels have declined by 99%. Once an important source of food, medicine and leather for indigenous peoples in the watershed, this sacred animal remains only in the memories of elders. (6)
Flow: Recruitment and Escapement (2022)
Flow: Recruitment and Escapement is an 8 by 3 foot collagraphic mixed media print on Japanese Shoji paper. It depicts a multitude of young adult yellow eels making their way upstream in a process called “recruitment.” There they will remain until they reach sexual maturity often decades later. They are crossing paths with large sexually mature females, now black with silvery bellies, as they head downstream towards the ocean in a process called “escapement.” The eels are rendered at more or less their actual relative sizes.
Elegy for the Silver Eel (2022/ 2023)
“Elegy for the Silver Eel” is a visual poem typeset and framed as Concrete Poetry. I wrote the poem in 2022 after seeing photos of eels damaged and dying after passing through turbines at the Carillon Damn where the Ottawa River meets the St Lawrence.
The shaped text was hand-typeset by me using Helvetica font and printed with the Vandercook letterpress at the Carleton University Book Arts Lab in 2023. A total of 18 impressions were made.
Beneath (2025)
In the last year I have been examining the absence-presence conundrum in the form of trace – the indication of the existence or passing of something. A trace exists because something was present. The trace can signify both the absence of presence (no sitings) and the presence of absence (extinction). Eels make an ideal subject for my visual experiments.
Beneath is a six-layered collagraph in a light box playing with the ideas of presence, absence and trace. The piece comprises, from the top down, two translucent prints of surface water over three difference prints of eels, adhered to a base of white paper. The work is backlit by battery operated LED strip lights behind the prints. When the batteries fail, the eels will be only ghostly traces.
References:
(1) The American Eel. The Ottawa Riverkeeper website, https://ottawariverkeeper.ca/what-we-do-2/issues/endangered-species/the-american-eel/.
(2) Searle. Absence. Environmental Humanities 12:1 (May 2020) 167-172. DOI 10.1215/22011919-8142253 © 2020 Adam Searle.
(3) Dolly Jørgensen. Presence of absence, absence of presence, and extinction narratives. Published in Nature, Temporality and Environmental Management: Scandinavian and Australian Perspectives on Landscapes and Peoples, L. Head, S. Saltzman, G. Setten and M. Stenseke (eds), 45-58. Routledge, 2016.
(4) Aaron Beswick. Terror, violence and organized crime: Inside the lawless East Coast fishery. National Post, May 01, 2025.
(5) Jacoby, et al. Anguilla rostrata. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2017- 3.RLTS.T191108A121739077.en.
(6) Algonquins of Ontario, Returning Kichisippi Pimisi, the American Eel, to the Ottawa River Basin: Bridging the Gap between Scientific and Aboriginal Traditional Knowledge, 2012, 2-3.