Fisherman sick of seeing ‘minced’ eels
Large numbers of eels are being minced up in the turbines of Kara¯ piro Dam every year as they attempt to make it back downstream to spawn.
That’s after eels have been transferred from the bottom to the top of the dam, supporting commercial eeling in the lake.
Recreational fisherman Erin Tindale, who throws out lines below the dam, has had enough of seeing the sad and gruesome sight of dead eels floating down the river.
‘‘Elvers [juvenile eels], equivalent to the size of a garden worm with fins, swim around 3000km from the Pacific Islands, to come to New Zealand where their parents originate,’’ Tindale said.
‘‘Two million elvers are transferred above several of the Waikato hydro dams, not just Kara¯ piro, every year.’’
He said there are only two outcomes for the ‘‘little champions’’ – getting caught by commercial eelers, or meeting their end in the turbines.
‘‘Yes, habitat is limited and maybe it is sustainable to commercially fish eels, but the survivors deserve the right to spawn,’’ Tindale said.
Mercury, the power company in charge of the dam, say eel mortality has been reported in the past, and Waikato Regional Council has been notified to try to determine the cause.
‘‘We haven’t been aware of any recent incidents, and nothing has been brought to our attention,’’ spokesperson Craig Dowling said.
Dowling added that commercial eel fishers transfer the elvers from Kara¯ piro into select hydro lakes as permitted by the Ministry of Primary Industries.
‘‘This is in accordance with the resource consent conditions,’’ he said. ‘‘The fishers also transfer any eels caught that are above the catchable weights, or less than 4kg above Kara¯ piro, back into the Waikato River well below the hydro stations.’’
But Tindale said his finding suggested otherwise.
Dr Adam Daniel, Fish and Game’s fisheries manager for Auckland and Waikato, had confronted similar issues while working in the United States with the Army Corps of Engineers, handling salmon passage through seven big dams in the Columbia River power scheme.
‘‘In dollar terms, to get half of those fish down, you’d have to spill some of the water, which could be upwards of, for some of the larger dams in the United States, close to a million dollars an hour to run fish bypass,’’ Daniel said.
That cost was ‘‘outrageous’’, he said, and the case of the Kara¯ piro Dam comes down to a social question of whether to transfer the eels above the dam, accepting that most of them will die as a result, or to restore or create wetland habitats for them in the lower Waikato basin.
‘‘That’s one thing we’re probably well ahead of the curve on,’’ Daniel said. ‘‘Fish and Game have been creating more wetlands than anyone else for a long time. I believe we’re well over 100 wetlands in the last five or six years in the Waikato.’’
But there still weren’t enough wetlands to accommodate the 1.2 million tonnes of elver that show up at the bottom of the Kara¯ piro Dam each year.
‘‘The long and the short of it is it’s not a a pretty picture: the solution is expensive, and in terms of the responsibility of who pays, I guess it would be the power company.
‘‘But they have certainly created more habitat than what was there to begin with. The problem is, [the eels] just cannot currently complete their life cycle.’’