April 15, 2013 — Elvers, the spaghetti-thin transparent juvenile American eels, may be the most sought-after commercial marine species in Maine right now, but they are not the first to rocket to prominence due to demand in the Far East.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was sea urchins. The round, spiny, baseball-sized creatures are treasured in Japan and neighboring countries for their roe, which is considered a seafood delicacy. But in the late 1980s local stocks in the western Pacific Ocean began to wane. That’s when Asian seafood dealers discovered that Maine had plenty.
Landings for Maine urchins, long considered a nuisance by lobstermen, soared at a time when few restrictions on urchin harvesting were in place. In less than 10 years, the statewide volume of urchin landings exploded from 1.4 million pounds to more than 41 million pounds.
The boom, however, turned into a bust. The annual value of Maine’s urchin landings went from $236,000 in 1987 to more than $35 million in 1995, but declined quickly again in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Last year, when the average annual price was $2.63 per pound, urchin fishermen statewide earned less than $5 million for their catch and, for the first time since 1987, caught less than 2 million pounds.
Now that a spike in Asian demand for eels has elvers fetching top dollar — around $2,000 per pound this spring, as opposed to $185 per pound three years ago — some are wondering if Maine’s elver fishery will go the way of the urchins.
But others who had a front row seat to the urchin gold rush of the late 1980s and early 1990s say the regulatory situation with elvers is very different. Unlike the urchin fishery, American eels make up a multistate fishery and so are regulated by federal law. And unlike urchins, strict conservation measures for elvers had been in place for many years before the price exploded.
Bill Sutter, a Wiscasset resident who has dragged for urchins since the 1960s, said Thursday that federal regulators likely will impose tighter restrictions on American eel harvests before catches start declining. Annual catches of elvers in Maine increased from 3,100 pounds in 2010 to 19,000 in 2012.
Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News