Starting in late March, hundreds of fishermen leave the cozy warmth of their homes, prepared to spend the freezing night or dawn hours along coastal estuaries. Navigating slippery banks and rocks, wading in frigid water, enduring bad weather, staying awake through the tide cycle on three or four hours of sleep, they await the arrival of millions of tiny, translucent creatures called elvers that have traveled 1,200 miles from the Sargasso Sea.
Using dip nets or funnel-shaped “fyke” nets, each fisherman is authorized by the state to harvest a tiny quota of elvers (sometimes called “glass eels”) as they swim from saltwater to freshwater, throughout a season that lasts until the end of May.
The harvested elvers were originally destined for life on the East Coast, growing to adulthood as “yellow eels” and spending years in freshwater before migrating back as “silver eels” to the Sargasso to spawn and die. (Names reflect changes in pigmentation.) Instead, they’re in for an unexpected detour. Treated with care to ensure they stay alive, Maine landings are shipped to aquaculture facilities in Asia, where they will be grown to adult size, then processed for an ever-increasing food market.
Maine is the heart of the East Coast elver fishery — one of only two states allowed to harvest the tiny creatures (the other is South Carolina, where only 10 licenses are issued and fishing locations are limited). Landings for Maine’s elver fishery, constrained for the first time in 2014 by an overall state quota, declined by more than 8,000 pounds, from 18,076 pounds in 2013 to 9,690 pounds. Value also decreased by more than $24 million to a total of $8.47 million, attributed in part to the quota constraint and a decline in per pound value from 2013 of nearly $1,000. The decline in value for the elver fishery moved it from the second most valuable, a position it held for two years, to fourth.
Even so, enormous profits in recent years have made those cold, dark nights more than worthwhile. And some predict there are more opportunities to come, both in Asia and the United States.