Watts Bar Tailwaters Action

Arnold Cagley and I went below Watts Bar Dam today to fish the tailwaters.  We caught a few of the usual  tailwater type fish; small cats, drum, smallmouth, and largemouth.  The most interesting find of the trip was an american eel (Anguilla rostrata) I found in the boxes up in the dam. I looked up american eels on the internet and they are pretty fascinating creatures. Here is what The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service website has to say:

American eels begin their lives as eggs hatching in the Sargasso Sea, a 2-million-square-mile warm-water lens in the North Atlantic between the West Indies and the Azores. After hatching, the buoyant eel eggs float to the ocean surface and hatch into small, transparent larvae shaped like willow leaves. These larvae drift with the Gulf Stream and other currents, taking about a year to reach the Atlantic coast. By this time, the larval eels have developed fins and the shape of adult eels. In this first phase, the juveniles – called glass eels – are without pigment and still transparent. In the second phase, juvenile eels develop gray to greenish-brown pigmentation and are called elvers. Juveniles slowly develop into yellow eels, the sexually immature adults that are actually yellow-greenish to olive-brown.