Dealing With an Eel Invader in Florida
Sept. 30 -- When John Curnutt first netted a catch of Asian swamp eels and dumped the slithery, brown, tubelike creatures into a bucket, he knew Florida was facing an unusually fierce invader.
“Usually the fish we capture calm down after sitting in the bucket in warm weather,” says Curnutt, a research ecologist at the Florida biological division of the U.S. Geological Survey. “These eels just kept flopping. We finally had to pour a chemical in the bucket to kill them. They’re solid muscle.”
Savored and Feared
In China and Japan, the Asian swamp eel, also known as the rice eel, is a delicacy. Sometimes called unagi when it’s on the table, the eel is eaten pickled, with sweet sauces, grilled on a stick and broiled over rice, and other variations. Not surprisingly, the muscular fish is prized in China for its stamina-lending properties.
But in Florida, appetites for the 3-foot-long eel are rare. Indeed, the creature, introduced as an exotic species sometime in the early to mid-1990s, is doing very well near the top of the food chain.
That’s worrisome to ecologists, who fear the species could suck up food supplies of native fish and wading birds in Florida’s 1.4 million-acre Everglades National Park. No one is sure how the eel first arrived in the state, but Curnutt suggests it may have been released by someone who had tried to raise the species on a fish farm.
Although the eels have not reached the interior of the Everglades park, their numbers are dense — possibly in the tens of thousands — just around its borders, in nearly 55 miles of outlying canal systems. Populations of the eel have also been found in Hawaii, north of Miami and in southern Georgia.
Some fear the extremely mobile and hardy eel could spread even further. Leo Nico, the first USGS biologist to discover the eel in Florida, believes it could eventually penetrate large portions of the United States if left unchecked.
The problem is finding a way to stop it.
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