Saving Seafood

Maine man pleads guilty to illegal trafficking in baby eels valued at $375K

June 20, 2017 — A 38-year-old Woolwich man pleaded guilty on Friday to illegally trafficking in poached elvers — juvenile American eels — in 2012.

Michael Squillace pleaded guilty to violating the federal Lacey Act, which prohibits interstate transport or transactions of any species of fish or wildlife illegally harvested or handled in any state. He was released on personal recognizance, according to court documents. A sentencing date was not available on Monday. He faces up to five years in prison with a maximum of 3 years supervised release.

Prosecutors from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Environment and Natural Resources Division and Environmental Crimes Section said Squillace illegally sold 183 pounds of elvers, valued at about $375,000, to an unnamed Maine elver dealer.

Since 2011, elvers on average have fetched around $1,500 per pound for fishermen, and netted more than $4 million total for the 12 convicted poachers who have pleaded guilty to federal charges in South Carolina, Virginia and Maine.

Squillace is the sixth midcoast Maine man to be charged with selling poached elvers in recent years, most as part of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service investigation dubbed “Operation Broken Glass,” which has spanned across 11 states on the East Coast. Eleven people so far have pleaded guilty to federal charges filed in Maine, South Carolina and Virginia, and have admitted to trafficking in more than $2.75 million worth of illegally harvested elvers, according to federal prosecutors.

In March, William Sheldon, 71, of Woolwich, a longtime commercial elver dealer operating as Kennebec Glass Eels pleaded not guilty to trafficking in elvers between 2011 and 2014.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

INSIDE THE MULTI-MILLION-DOLLAR WORLD OF EEL TRAFFICKING

June 13, 2017 — The alleged kingpin of one of the biggest domestic wildlife smuggling operations ever to hit the East Coast is exactly where you’d expect to find him on a rainy evening in early May: firmly planted in a swivel chair at a big green metal desk inside his renovated Quonset hut on Foster Street, in Ellsworth, Maine.

At this post Bill Sheldon waits day and night for fishermen to come and fill his bowl with writhing masses of baby eels.

The 72-year-old fisherman wears glasses, a blue flannel shirt, jeans, duck boots, and a brown L.L. Bean baseball cap. His cell phone goes quack, quack, quack when it rings. The sign above his head reads, “Buying Glass Eels Here,” with the day’s market price: $1,250 per pound. The eel bowl sits atop a digital scale on a small, four-legged table. Nearby a scented candle burns in a glass jar (“to cut the fish smell”).

Grandfatherly and laid-back, Sheldon doesn’t look the part of a serious criminal. But on March 30, one week after the start of Maine’s 10-week-long eel fishing season, Sheldon and another man, Timothy Lewis, were indicted for illegally trafficking wildlife. They pleaded not guilty.

According to court documents, Lewis, 46, is charged with two felonies involved with conspiring to unlawfully launder eels up and down the East Coast. Sheldon, who operated a business called Kennebec Glass Eels at his home in Woolwich, a motel in Ellsworth, and a rental house in Moncks Corner, South Carolina, is up against more serious charges: seven counts of conspiracy to smuggle eels while violating laws in seven states (Maine, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and South Carolina).

For each felony, Sheldon faces a maximum sentence of a $250,000 fine and up to five years in prison, as well as the forfeiture of any related vessels, equipment, and vehicles, including a black 2012 Ford F450 with the license plate EELWGN. (He preemptively sold the truck but kept the vanity plate.) Sheldon and Lewis are scheduled for separate hearings in July.

For now, Sheldon is free to buy eels for a newly formed company, Maine Eel Trade & Aquaculture, which opened in 2015, with purchasing locations in Waldoboro, Portland, Steuben, and the Quonset hut in Ellsworth.

Read the full story at National Geographic

Maine elver fishermen caught $12 million worth of eels this season

June 12, 2017 — Maine elver fishermen netted more than $12 million in baby eels in the season that ended last week — the fourth-highest grossing year since 1994, officials said.

The season came to a close last week with 9,282 pounds of elvers caught in Maine, which is 334 pounds shy of the statewide catch limit, according to Maine Department of Marine Resources.

Maine, where more eels are caught than any other state, has a yearly statewide limit of 9,616 pounds on elver harvests, and by law the season ends either when that quota is reached or on June 7.

Maine’s 1,000 or so licensed elver fishermen on average earned just above $1,300 per pound this year, keeping the average price above $1,000 per pound for the fifth time in the past six years. The highest average price was in 2015, when fishermen earned more than $2,100 per pound but a cold spring resulted in fishermen catching only 5,200 pounds of elvers statewide.

The $12 million annual harvest value is the fourth-highest total for the fishery since 1994, according to DMR statistics. The highest-ever statewide harvest value was $40.3 million in 2012.

Maine’s elver fishery has been one of the state’s most valuable fisheries since 2011, when changes in global supply and demand made prices in Maine nearly quintuple, from $185 per pound to nearly $900 per pound. The baby eels, about 2,000 of which comprise a pound, are shipped live to East Asia, where they are raised in aquaculture ponds and later harvested for the region’s seafood market.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

Elver season ends

June 8, 2017 — Maine’s elver season ended Wednesday. By most accounts it was successful.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission limited Maine harvesters to a landings quota of 9,616 pounds for this year. According to the Department of Marine Resources, as of 6 p.m. Monday, Maine dealers reported buying 9,281.269 pounds of elvers and paying harvesters a total of $12,088,884 — an average price of $1,303 per pound.

The total quota is allocated among harvesters licensed by the state and the four federally recognized Indian tribes.

As of Monday evening, DMR-licensed harvesters had landed just over 7,315 pounds out of a total quota of 7,566.3 pounds.

Harvesters of the Houlton Band of Maliseet had landed about 87 pounds from their approximately 107-pound quota.

Micmac Nation harvesters landed their entire 38.8-pound quota and Penobscot Nation harvesters had landed all but one pound of their 620-pound quota.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American

Season for harvesting Eels For Sushi Will Be Over Soon

May 30, 2017 — Maine’s annual season for harvesting baby eels from rivers and streams will likely be over in the coming days.

The baby eels, called elvers, are sold to Asian aquaculture companies and used to make sushi. They are the subject of one of the most lucrative fisheries in New England and are currently selling for about $1,300 per pound.

Fishermen are limited to quota of a little more than 9,500 pounds of the eels for the entire fishery, and they are within 400 pounds of it. State officials say fishermen have a little more than 366 pounds of quota left. Once the quota is hit, the fishery shuts down.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at WABI

Maine’s latest fishing frenzy brings in $1,200 a pound – and it’s not lobster

May 26, 2017 — It is just past midnight, rain clouds stalking a full moon, and Julie Keene is out on a muddy riverbank in thigh-high rubber boots and a camouflage jacket, a headlamp strapped over her hair.

As she wrestles with an oversize fishing net, Keene tells how she went from rags to riches, and that’s not a story many fishermen tell.

Just a few years ago, the sardine factory in her hometown of Lubec had closed, and Keene was scrounging for a living digging clams and gathering periwinkles from the beach.

“We were so damn poor we were on food stamps,” Keene said.

Then came what for Maine was the equivalent of a gold rush. It was slimy, squirmy baby eels — in such demand in Asian markets that they were suddenly more profitable than even the beloved Maine lobster.

One memorable night in 2012 when the baby eel were running strong, Keene was paid $36,000 — in cash — for her catch.

“I almost threw up. I felt like I had robbed a bank. I couldn’t grasp the concept of that much money,” Keene recalled.

The eel rush allowed Keene, the daughter of a lighthouse keeper, to buy a small farm, a tractor and a truck. She even started a retirement account.

Government regulators have since stepped in to slow the fishing frenzy, but with American glass eels fetching $1,200 a pound and up, federal and state authorities have launched a wide-ranging criminal investigation to halt what has become a multimillion-dollar international smuggling industry that is threatening the survival of the much-maligned species.

Eleven people have pleaded guilty in Maine and South Carolina since last year to illegally trafficking in baby eels, and two more are awaiting trial.

“Skyrocketing prices for juvenile American eels in Asia have led to a surge in poaching and trafficking in this unique species, threatening to wipe it out in the rivers of the Northeast,” Dan Ashe, then director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said when the case was announced in October.

Europe has had serious problems. The eel population has declined by 90% across the continent over the last 30 years, and with the fish now considered critically endangered there, exports to Asia have been banned.

In the United States, the American eel was at “very high risk” of extinction in the wild as of 2014, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Read the full story at the Los Angeles Times

How Maine came to play a central role in an international eel smuggling scheme

May 23, 2017 — Years after officials launched an investigation into baby eel poaching on the East Coast, the first of several men to plead guilty to participating in the wildlife trafficking ring was sentenced last week in a federal courtroom in Maine.

Michael Bryant, 40, a former Baileyville resident who now lives in West Yarmouth, Massachusetts, is one of more than a dozen men who the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service says poached thousands of pounds of the baby eels, also known as elvers or “glass” eels, from 2011 through 2014. Since 2011, elvers on average have fetched around $1,500 per pound for fishermen, and netted more than $4 million total for the 12 convicted poachers who have pleaded guilty to federal charges in South Carolina, Virginia and Maine.

Maine found itself at the center of a criminal enterprise that illegally netted elvers along the Atlantic seaboard, where most states ban their harvesting, and then shipped the eels overseas to feed East Asia’s voracious seafood appetite, according to investigators.

Bryant and other poachers benefitted from a combination of environmental, economic and regulatory factors earlier this decade that created an unexpected boon for elver fishermen in Maine, where the vast majority of the country’s legal elver harvest occurs. Maine, one of only two states with legal elver fisheries, has approximately 1,000 licensed elver fishermen who over the past seven years have caught 81,000 pounds of elvers valued at more than $126 million. South Carolina, the other state, issues only 10 licenses each year and has much smaller harvests.

Last October, Bryant was one of seven men who pleaded guilty in federal court in Maine to trafficking in poached elvers. According court documents, Bryant did not have a fishing license but caught 207 pounds of elvers in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Virginia over four consecutive springs, from 2011 through 2014. He sold them to unscrupulous dealers or middlemen, with roughly half his catch being funneled through Maine, for an average of $1,600 per pound, netting a total of $331,084, according to authorities.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

Officials: Maine Elver Harvest at Almost 80 Percent of Annual Quota

May 8, 2017 — After a slow start, Maine fishermen are closing in on their annual harvest quota for baby glass eels more than a month before the season officially ends.

Jeff Nichols, a spokesman for the Maine Department of Marine Resources, said the eels — known as elvers — are currently fetching around $1,300 a pound from dealers, who can’t ship the catch to Asian markets fast enough.

“We’re probably at almost 80 percent of the total quota, harvesters have landed over 7,500 pounds of the 9,616 of the overall quota and that leaves a couple of thousand pounds left to harvest,” he said.

Read the full story at Maine Public Radio

Elver prices rebounding

May 3, 2017 — With a month still left in the fishing season that ends May 31, the price of elvers (technically, glass eels) is on the rise, but many fishermen have already filled their annual quota and are dumping juvenile eels back into the water.

According to Ellsworth elver buyer Bill Sheldon, there are still plenty of elvers in the water, but that’s not doing the fishermen any good. Some harvesters with just 1 or 2 pounds of quota remaining have had to toss 15 to 20 pounds of elvers overboard to avoid overfishing their allocations.

“It’s a shame when you consider the economics of Hancock and Washington counties,” Sheldon said on Monday.

Maine elver harvesters are limited to a total annual landings quota of 9,616 pounds set by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. According to preliminary figures released by the Department of Marine Resources, as of 6 p.m. on Sunday, dealers had reported buying just under 7,218.4 pounds from licensed harvesters, approximately 75 percent of the annual limit. With 31 days still to go in the season, only 2,397.6 pounds of quota remained available to harvest.

On Monday, Sheldon said that after falling to $1,150 per pound, the going price for elvers was $1,300 and going up.

The price “seems to have bottomed out,” Sheldon said. “My expectation is that it will increase slowly to the end of the season.”

According to DMR, the average price harvesters have received for elvers so far this season is $1,311. A few years ago, the price reached $2,600 per pound.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American

One on One with Maine Department of Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Keliher

July 12, 2016 — In the five years since Maine Department of Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Keliher took on the agency’s leadership, he and his team have played a central role in making the state’s commercial fishing industry stronger.

The industry reached an all-time high in value in 2015, earning harvesters just over $616.55 million, a gain of $33 million over the previous record set in 2014. With the economic impact on dealers and related business, the industry has an overall value of closer to $2 billion. Maine products range from the flagship lobster to the elver, or baby eel, which fetched $1,435 a pound in the recent season.

Mainebiz recently talked with Keliher about some of the challenges facing the state’s commercial fishing industry. An edited transcript follows.

Mainebiz: What are today’s pressing concerns for the industry?

Pat Keliher: The changing ocean environment is a major challenge. Water temperatures in the Gulf of Maine are rising and, while it’s been associated with the presence of new commercial species like black sea bass, it’s also been linked to invasive species like green crabs, the decline of species like shrimp and a shift of Maine’s lobster resource up the coast. I’d say that challenge is only going to grow.

MB: How has DMR addressed sustainability in the lobster industry?

PK: We’re planning to invest more department resources in research to ensure we’re not only able to effectively monitor Maine’s valuable lobster resource but also to predict changes that impact the resource and allow us to put forward adaptive management and regulatory changes. As a result of a motion I made in April, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s lobster technical committee will conduct an in-depth analysis of various issues associated with lobster stocks, ocean currents and management measures in the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank. The goal of this research is to better understand and adapt to the changing ocean environment.

Read the full story at MaineBiz