February 19, 2018
Last week a City of Port Lavaca employee contacted us after finding information about our eel project online. He had found a bunch of eels in an effluent box in the discharge channel of the city’s Wastewater Treatment plant. Our project collaborator Stephen Curtis, from TPWD’s River Studies Program, picked them up and got them to us, and the event was featured in local newspapers as well as on social media, which then sparked several other reports of eels.
We quickly processed the 16 specimens and find this collection particularly fascinating not only because of the situation in which these eels were found (maybe there’s more of these ready-made eel traps out there just waiting to be sampled), but it also contains a wide range of sizes (177-812mm/~7-32 inches, in length) and is another indicator that our outreach efforts (by TPWD and FoTX) are working. Our eel project just got funded 3 months ago, and we’ve quickly gone from being pessimistic to quite optimistic about our ability to reach the goal of 100 specimens from across the state for genetic and otolith microchemistry analyses.
