American Eel: ID, Life Cycle, Eating and Value

The American eel is the only freshwater eel in North America (USFWS): a long, snake-shaped fish covered in slime that hatches in the Sargasso Sea, grows up in rivers, lakes and estuaries between Venezuela and Greenland, and returns to the sea once to spawn and die. It feeds at night on insects, worms, crustaceans and small fish, and hides by day among snags and plants near shore (USFWS; Wikipedia).

• Body: long, snake-like and elongate, with small fins (Wikipedia; USFWS)
• Skin: looks naked and slimy, but has tiny, scattered scales under a mucus layer (Wikipedia)
• Colour by stage: yellow eels are the immature, growing stage; silver eels, ready to migrate, turn grey with a white or cream belly (Wikipedia)
• Sex: females grow larger and are lighter in colour, with smaller eyes and higher fins (Wikipedia; USFWS)

The look-alike that matters most is the lamprey. A lamprey has no jaws, a round sucking disc for a mouth, seven gill openings on each side and no paired fins (Wikipedia). A true eel has jaws and paired fins (Wikipedia). Sea-going 'eels' such as the moray eel and the wolf eel, and the freshwater electric eel of South America, are different fish again.

Wikipedia describes five stages:

• Leptocephalus: a transparent, leaf-shaped larva with a small pointed head and large teeth, carried by currents across the Atlantic for 7-12 months
• Glass eel: still transparent, but already eel-shaped
• Elver: gaining pigment over roughly 3-12 months, sex not yet determined
• Yellow eel: the immature adult that spends 10-25 years in fresh or brackish water
• Silver eel: the mature stage that swims back to the Sargasso Sea

A female can lay up to 4 million buoyant eggs and dies after spawning; the eggs hatch within a week. Some eels travel as far as 6,000 km (Wikipedia). USFWS adds that eels in estuaries mature faster than those far inland.

• Reverse migration: it is catadromous, living in fresh water and going to sea to breed, the opposite of salmon (Wikipedia; USFWS)
• One shared population: all American eels breed in the same area of the Sargasso Sea as a single mixed population, which Wikipedia calls panmictic
• Huge range: from about 5°N to 62°N, including the Great Lakes and Mississippi tributaries (Wikipedia)
• Blocked by dams: hydroelectric dams on its migration routes are one of its main threats (Wikipedia)

None of the agency or reference pages we read describes the American eel as venomous or as a danger to swimmers. It is a shy, nocturnal predator that hides by day (USFWS). The practical nuisance is the slime: the mucus layer that protects it against friction and disease (USFWS) makes it very hard to hold. Wet your hands, support the body and see our handle and release guide if you catch one by accident.

Eel is eaten widely; Wikipedia's elver article says Japan alone consumes more than 70% of the world's eel catch, and the American eel has long supported commercial fisheries. Two cautions apply. First, Wikipedia lists heavy metals, dioxins, chlordane and PCBs among the contaminants that affect American eels, so check your state's fish consumption advisory for the water it came from. Second, the US stock is rated depleted (ASMFC) and the species is IUCN Endangered, so harvest is regulated: check your state's size and bag rules before keeping one.

Almost all of the money is in baby eels. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) says growing international demand for glass eels since 2011 has pushed up both landings and the price per pound, which is why Maine, the main US glass eel state, fishes under a quota of 9,688 pounds a year for 2025-2027 (ASMFC, read 25 September 2026). We could not open an official per-pound price, so we do not quote one here.

For comparison:

• European elvers reach up to 1,000 euros per kg (Wikipedia 'Elver', read 25 September 2026; the article gives no year)
• Adult (yellow) eels are worth far less per fish. US commercial landings were about 284,625 pounds in 2024, against 2.5-3.6 million pounds a year from the 1970s to the mid-1980s (ASMFC)
• Ontario: during the 1980s and early 1990s the eel was among the province's three most valuable commercial species, with a peak harvest worth $600,000; the catch fell from about 223,000 kg in the early 1980s to 11,000 kg in 2002 (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia names hydroelectric dams that block migration, low dissolved oxygen and chemical contamination as the main threats, and describes LED lights being developed to steer eels away from turbines. Greenpeace added the American, European and Japanese eels to its seafood red list in 2010 (Wikipedia 'Elver'). ASMFC's 2023 benchmark assessment found the US population still depleted.