Dominion gives eels a lift on river trip

ROANOKE RAPIDS, N.C.

For more than 60 years, American eels have wiggled their way up the Roanoke River only to be blocked here - at a 100-foot-tall dam that creates electricity and curbs flooding on the Virginia-North Carolina border.

Before the dam and two others were built at neighboring Lake Gaston and Kerr Lake, eels could swim freely all the way to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, near Salem and Roanoke.

Along the way, they were fodder for game fish, including striped bass and shad, and were caught by fishermen who sold them for sushi or smoked the eels themselves.

Now, energy giant Dominion Virginia Power has installed two eel ladders at its hydroelectric dam in Roanoke Rapids. It is the first phase in what wildlife experts and conservationists hope will be a fully restored eel highway from the Atlantic Ocean to the Blue Ridge.

Bob Graham, a Dominion biologist, calls the project the "first and biggest eelway passage in the Southeast" - an attempt to retain dams and all they do for humans while also letting nature run its course.

The two ladders, built by a Canadian company for $500,000, resemble long, metal slides rising from the dark green waters of the Roanoke River in front of the concrete dam.

Each day, eels make their way up the enclosed chutes through a series of plastic pegs, which look like a Plinko carnival game, softened by a trickle of lake water.

They climb these unusual mazes in steps, stopping to rest by wrapping around the pegs, before falling into catch barrels near the top of the dam. There, Chad Coley, a fisheries biologist hired by Dominion to run the recovery effort, is waiting.

Coley tags the climbers with a metal chip injected into a back muscle on their wormy little bodies. He measures their lengths, counts them, writes down the results and, later that day, releases the mass of wriggling slime above the dam into Roanoke Rapids Lake.

The lake is eight miles long before it runs into Lake Gaston dam, also operated by Dominion, giving the eels plenty of room to roam and play their role in the ecosystem.

Since the ladders were completed in March and April, Coley has relocated nearly 280,000 eels - "way more than what we ever expected," he said.

Coley chuckles when asked about the response from residents who see him dumping hundreds of eels into Roanoke Rapids Lake.

"After I explain what we're doing, nine out of 10 people are glad to hear about the project," he said during a recent tour.

That 10th, more skeptical person, Coley said, often is worried the eels will reproduce and take over the lake. But they won't; all Atlantic eels breed in the Sargasso Sea in the middle of the ocean, not in freshwater lakes or rivers.

Or they fear the snakelike animals will bite swimmers. They won't do that, either; such eels are timid and generally flee from people, experts say.

The project is part of a national campaign to revive the Atlantic eel, a species in decline from Canada to Florida for many reasons, including an abundance of dams that block their natural life cycles.

Once adults reach sexual maturity, between the ages of 7 and 12, they leave their homes in rivers, lakes and estuaries and head toward the Sargasso Sea. Once they mate there, they die.

Their offspring float with the currents and winds until they are pushed by chance into one of hundreds of coastal inlets. About the size and shape of spaghetti noodles, the juveniles - known as elvers - swim up these waterways until they reach a place they like. There, they live and grow, reaching lengths of up to 14 inches.

"Eels are not very sexy. Some people even consider them nuisances, mostly because they mistake them for snakes," said Pete Kornegay, a former state biologist in North Carolina and current board member of the Roanoke River Basin Association, a conservation group.

"But from the perspective of our coastal habitats, they are extremely important," Kornegay said, adding that the river association is "more than happy" with the new ladders at Roanoke Rapids.

Dominion didn't undertake the project because it loves eels. The company was required to help the eels, as well as American shad, find passage over its dams under a licensing agreement with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The agreement, reached in 2005 after years of negotiation, requires Dominion to build ladders for eels, and later for shad, at its dams on Roanoke Rapids Lake and Lake Gaston, another big reservoir that provides drinking water to Virginia Beach, among other customers.

The Army Corps of Engineers operates Kerr Lake, the biggest source of clean water of the three man-made lakes on the Roanoke River. The corps is not required to build ladders for migratory eels and fish, but "we're in the process of negotiating with them to do just that at a later date," said Wilson Laney, a fisheries biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Raleigh.

If the eels can get past Kerr Lake, they should have clear sailing to the headwaters of the Roanoke River.

The ladders at Roanoke Rapids are the first ones designed specifically for eels in North Carolina.

In Virginia, the first eel ladder opened several years ago on the South Fork of the Shenandoah River. Others are planned on the Shenandoah and on other waterways that drain into the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, West Virginia and Pennsylvania, said Alan Weaver, director of fish passages with the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.

As for getting the eels back down the Roanoke River once they reach maturity so they can reach the Sargasso Sea, Dominion will have to provide that access across its dams as well.

Graham, the Dominion biologist, said the company has several more years to contemplate that next engineering feat:

"We'll get them there."

Scott Harper, (757) 446-2340, scott.harper@pilotonline.com