April 29, 2014 — It’s not always good to be popular.
Take the case of glass eels, the juvenile offspring of the American eel (Anguilla rostrata). They’re considered a delicacy, cooked in a wok and tossed like noodles or they can be fattened in a pond to a thousand times their initial weight and sold overseas for $10 a pound. In 2012 the eel fishery in Maine brought in an estimated $40,000,000, creating a sudden boom.
But prices are falling, along with the number of eels. In Europe, where the fishing is intense, populations are down 90 percent during the last 40 years and there is a moratorium on harvests. That’s led to a sudden boom in New England’s eel fishery.
“A year ago people were getting $2,000 a pound for glass eels,” noted Mark Faherty of Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary. “Now it’s done to $500.”
Ten years ago it was $30 a pound. Despite the fluctuating value of the tiny three-inch eels Sanctuary Director Bob Prescott believes the real pressure is coming not from fishermen (catching glass eels is illegal in Massachusetts) but habitat destruction. Eels have an odd life cycle, the exact opposite of our river herring that swim in from the ocean and up our streams to breed each spring. Eels are freshwater fish lurking for decades in the depths of Cape Cod ponds that migrate downstream and swim out to the Sargasso Sea where they mate. The young tiny eels hatch in the mat of floating seaweed and journey back to the coast arriving as two or three-inch clear translucent glass eels with twin black eyes. If they eaten more and developed darker pigments they’re elvers.
Read the full story at WickedLocal.com