May 9, 2012 – ELLSWORTH, Maine — Even though federal officials are looking into whether elver fishing might be adversely affecting the abundance of American eels, the number of elver fishing licenses in the state of Maine went up by more than 50 percent last week.
But it wasn’t the Maine Department of Marine Resources that issued the 236 new licenses in the middle of the 2012 elver fishing season. It was the Passamaquoddy Tribe.
Licenses have been hotly sought-after this year, with demand for eels in the Far East pushing prices for the juvenile eels above $2,000 per pound. Up until last year, the average annual price Maine fishermen got for elvers had never been higher than $350 per pound.
Officials with Marine Patrol, the law enforcement division of DMR, have said the high price is the reason they’ve been busier than ever this spring with elver fishing violations, most of which have been for people fishing for the small, transparent juvenile eels without licenses. In order to protect the resource, DMR has capped the number of licenses it issues each year at 407.
Elvers are juvenile eels that spawn in the Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic Ocean and then migrate each spring to shore and into freshwater, where they grow into adults that eventually return to sea to breed. Maine fishermen are allowed to catch elvers only along tidal waterways that connect the Gulf of Maine to the state’s lakes and rivers.
DMR Commissioner Patrick Keliher said Tuesday that the Passamaquoddy decision to issue 236 new licenses last week caught the department by surprise. He said the tribe was given authority by the Legislature in the mid-1990s to issue fishing licenses but, because of the timing of when that authority was granted, there has not been a limit on the number of elver licenses the tribe can give to its members.
Last year, when demand for elvers took off and the average per-pound price soared to nearly $900, he said, the Passamaquoddys issued only two elver licenses. Even though the price consistently has been at least double that this year, DMR did not expect the tribe to issue significantly more licenses than it did in 2011, he said.
Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News.