Did you know that the US government once tried to transplant east coast eels to California? Weird but true!
It's a fun story. Train loads of eels! Crashes! Loss! Pyrrhic victory!
So. Settle in, friends, for a thread about some well-trained eels. 1/8
Freshwater eels aren't native to the US Pacific Coast. All the eels in N. America come from the Sargasso Sea, & swim in waters that empty into the Atlantic or Gulf of Mexico.
There are lots of lampreys on the W. coast. But no native eels.
But they wanted some. Like you do. 2/8
So in 1873 the famous fisheries expert Livingston Stone, working for the US Fisheries Commission & the CA Fisheries Commission, got to work.
He got 1,500 eels from Martha Vineyard, & 40,000 eels from the Hudson River, put them in an "aquarium car" on a train, & headed west. 3/8
The train got to Omaha in good shape, but somewhere out on the Great Plains tragedy struck. The train crashed, and all the fish were lost.
This put Stone back to square one, though apparently it improved fishing in Nebraska. 4/8
Undeterred, Stoned tried again the next year. This time he got 2,000 eels from the Hudson, & 1,500 small eels from NY Harbor.
The harbor eels all made it, & were introduced to San Francisco Bay.
Only 12 of the Hudson eels survived, and they went into the Sacramento River. 5/8
In 1879 Stone was back at it, shipping west 3,000 NY eels & 500 eels from New Jersey.
The NY eels were thrown out en route, as they didn't look like they'd make it. But all 500 NJ eels made the trip, & were released into the Sacramento River & Alameda Creek. 6/8
And finally, in 1882, J.G. Woodbury of the CA Fisheries Commission brought west 10 large eels. They all made it.
And that was the end of it. Californians caught eels off and on for a while, but the numbers fell off, & the effort was eventually deemed an inexplicable failure. 7/8
What they didn't know was that the eels needed to return to the Sargasso to breed, which wasn't going to happen from CA. And even if some intrepid eel had made the trip, the elvers wouldn't return to the Sacramento area.
Sometimes the eels win, folks.
As it should be. /fin
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