HARWICH, Mass. — May 07, 2012 — On April 11 at 2:30 in the morning, Sgt. Bob Brackett bumped down a long dirt road bordered by cranberry bogs and woods and pulled into the dirt parking lot of the Bells Neck Conservation Area. There were no other vehicles in the lot, but Brackett noticed two men standing alongside the concrete fish ladder that helps alewives climb upstream from the Herring River into the West Reservoir.
These were not high school revelers or even a couple of guys poaching alewives. The two men had dip nets and battery-powered bubbling aerators pumping oxygen into water-filled buckets. The tiny transparent eels, known as glass eels or elvers, which they were catching illegally, have recently become one of the most expensive delicacies in the world, with fish dealers paying more than $2,000 a pound.
"This year, the (poaching) activity exploded," Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries eel scientist Brad Chase said. Elvers don't have the swimming ability of the river herring and the fisheries division and others have been building special eel runs to get them past the swift flowing waters in herring runs, or over dams. Generally, the eels ascend a pipe into a locked collection box that is checked and emptied into the lake or pond daily by volunteers. Those boxes also have become the object of poachers, said one local volunteer, who noticed the pipe pulled off and the box cleaned out on two consecutive weekends on the run she monitors. She did not want to be identified to protect the run.
The price spike stems from a surge in demand from aquaculturists in Asian countries who purchase the wild juvenile elvers, raise them until they reach a half-pound then sell them in the sushi market, explained Mitchell Feigenbaum, principal of Delaware Valley Fish Co. of Portland, Maine. A significant drop in recent years in the number of wild Asian glass eels, combined with a European ban on exporting their own wild stock, meant the U.S. elvers suddenly commanded high prices. Feigenbaum said the price increase really isn't that large when you consider the profit farmers make selling the adult eels on the high-end sushi market. A good farmer, he said, could turn $2,000 worth of glass eels into $20,000 in sales.
A dozen years ago, the price for glass eels was $25 a pound. In recent years, it climbed to $325 and last year reached $900. Now at more than $2,000, the tiny translucent eels, less than 6 inches long, newly arrived in the Cape's rivers and streams from the Sargasso Sea this spring, were particularly inviting to poachers.
Harwich police Sgt. Brackett had no way of knowing, but the 2 pounds of elvers swimming in those unpretentious buckets could have fetched $4,000 to $5,000 when sold in Maine, one of only two states where it is legal to harvest and sell them. With prices that high, competition for prime spots on Maine's waterways has been fierce and the yields are nowhere near what fishermen get in Massachusetts, where the elver fishery is banned and the competition virtually nonexistent.
"I hear stories of someone coming in (to dealers) with 50 pounds of eels and I think, they must have been to Massachusetts," said Gail Wippelhauser, a Maine Department of Marine Resources scientist specializing in eels. "There's noplace in Maine where you can get that many eels in one night."
Read the Cape Cod Times story by Doug Frasier in the Chicago Tribune