August 29, 2013 — In an economically depressed Maine county, Bill Sheldon is the kingpin of a $40 million baby-eel industry that may be doomed to extinction. Find out what happens when a community full of armed fishermen and elver dealers stop being polite and start getting real.
High Street in Ellsworth, a busy four-lane road lined with a Denny’s, a McDonald’s, an L.L. Bean outlet, and a Sun360 tanning salon, leads to Mount Desert Island and Acadia National Park. Beyond the strip malls and lobster pounds, further down east, are scarlet-hued blueberry barrens and miles of unbroken fog. Drive from southern Maine in the summer and you’re bound to sit in Ellsworth traffic. Guidebooks claim the regional identity of the city has been stripped away, but at 3 a.m. the morning I arrived, a sign flashed outside the pet store in the cold night air: Cleaner Net & Air Pump For ELVER.
Behind Jasper’s Motel and Restaurant, a yellow extension cord snaked through the window of Room 27 and connected to a 110-volt bubbler pumping oxygen into a tank of elvers on the back of a Ford Super Duty, or, as its license plate says, EEL WAGN. This is Bill Sheldon’s truck. He’s an affable, clean-shaven guy, aged 67, with glasses and an LED light clipped to the brim of his hat. In 2012, he paid his fishermen $12 million for elvers (about a third of the estimated $40 million paid out in Maine over the season) and, for a couple weeks this spring, the elver kingpin holed up at Jasper’s Motel with a half million dollars in cash. The best runs and the best money too, he said, arrived on dark, moonless, rainy nights.
The elvers flew out of Logan or JFK international airpors to China and Taiwan in clear plastic bags filled with oxygenated water to feed the fastest-growing animal-feeding operations on the planet: Asian aquaculture. The baby eels, two inches long with glassine bodies, nearly invisible sperm-shaped fauna with a thin black vertebrae and a pair of magnificent black eyes, swim inland on the final stretch of a five-month, several-thousand-mile-long quest to find a freshwater home.
Eel farmers need babies caught in the wild since no one’s reliably bred the species in captivity. They are reared in ponds like seedlings: Plant a farm with elvers and, in six months, a pound of elvers might yield 1,200 pounds of meat that then might, at $10 a pound, fetch $120,000. Seventy percent of eels, unagi, was sold in Japan, according to one estimate by the newspaper The Yomiuri Shimbun. James Prosek’s seminal book on the subject, Eels, reports that some 40% of eel eaten in a Manhattan sushi joint probably flew from Maine to Asia and back again. Scarcity drove the prices up and, stream-side, a pound of elvers sold for around $2,000. Rumor had it some fishermen were clearing nearly $100,000 a night.
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