RIVER NORTH — Last week, Ben Gorashchenko looked down into the Chicago River at the long, twisting, wriggling creature he just reeled in.
Gorashchenko was pulling in an American eel — an extremely rare find in the Chicago River. Researchers told Block Club that, to their knowledge, there is just one other known instance of someone catching an American eel in the Chicago River in recent years, when a child caught one in 2017.
After Gorashchenko, 25, of River North, and his friend Joshua Lee, 24, of South Loop, unraveled the mystery of what they had just pulled up, he posted the find to the Reddit community r/ChicagoFishing, where commenters congratulated him on his luck.
But this catch also presents bigger mysteries — like what finding an eel in Chicago can tell us about the local ecosystem and how exactly this animal found its way to River North.
All American eels are born in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Soon after birth, they begin one of nature’s great journeys, making their way miles and miles through the ocean and up into freshwater river systems, where they live out their adult lives. As they grow older, they transform from tiny, transparent larvae into sleek, slimy fish that can grow up to 4 feet long.
Historically, American eels have been found in rivers and streams across eastern North America. That includes the Mississippi River and its tributaries, such as the Illinois and Des Plaines rivers, said Phil Willink, a fish biologist with the Illinois Natural History Survey. The Chicago River wasn’t continuously connected to the Mississippi River basin before the Illinois and Michigan Canal was built in the 19th century. But Willink said that eels would likely have had no problem shimmying through the muddy and often flooded Chicago Portage that spanned the Chicago and Des Plaines rivers before the canal was constructed.
Today, American eels are found every so often in local rivers connected to the Mississippi. But thanks to dam-building, overfishing, pollution and other threats, American eels are much rarer throughout their range. Getting from the Atlantic Ocean to the Chicago River is also a little more complex than it used to be. Electric barriers, installed over the past few decades to stop invasive species like silver carp, prevent fish from moving between the Mississippi River system and the Great Lakes.
“When you see an eel around here, it swam 3,000 miles to get here, which is crazy, and past all kinds of barriers, locks and dams and all these types of things,” Willink said. “So they’re amazing creatures.”
An American eel caught by Benjamin Gorashchenko while fishing the Chicago River in River North on May 4, 2026. He released the eel back into the river after taking this photo. Credit: Benjamin Gorashchenko
Given that, there are a few ways the eel Gorashchenko caught could have made it to Chicago. First, Willink said the fish-blocking barriers aren’t exactly air-tight.
“Fish slip past, we know that; and now we’re talking about eels that are masters at passing barriers,” he said.
The eel could have come from another direction, swimming up the St. Lawrence River, into Lake Ontario, through the canal that bypasses Niagara Falls, into Lake Erie and Lake Huron and, finally, Lake Michigan.
“That’s a long haul, even for eels, but that is certainly possible,” Willink said.
If there is indeed a wild population of American eels here, that illustrates how Chicago’s waters are eventually connected all the way to the ocean, said Austin Happel, a biologist at the Shedd Aquarium.
But Happel also said the eel might not have made it here on its own. Maybe someone had a pet eel they released or maybe it was released as part of a religious ritual, he said.
It may be impossible to definitively figure out this specific eel’s origin story: After admiring the catch, Gorashchenko and Lee released it back into the river.
Yet researchers wonder if there might be more eels down there. Tristan Widloe, a biologist with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, said that methods scientists typically use to sample local fish populations aren’t great at finding eels, which tend to hide out near the sediment. Eels are also nocturnal, and sampling is typically done during the day.
If anglers went out and found more eels, they might start to suspect there’s a decently sized local population, Happel said.
“There’s just so much more to learn,” Willink said. “Even in a city with 3 million people, we don’t know everything that’s going on in our rivers and lakes.”
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