Saving Seafood

Maine’s baby eel fishermen hope for normalcy in 2021

March 22, 2021 — Maine’s baby eel fishermen are hopeful for a more stable season in 2021 as they seek one of the most valuable natural resources in New England.

The fishermen seek the eels, called elvers, so they can be sold as seedstock to Asian aquaculture companies. They are then raised to maturity and sold as food, such as sushi.

Maine has the only significant fishery for the eels in the U.S., and they sometimes fetch more than $2,000 per pound.

The season starts Monday, just over a year after the coronavirus pandemic upended the 2020 season. Prices for the eels plummeted last year because of disruption to the worldwide economy caused by the early stages of the pandemic.

The price of elvers to fishermen fell from $2,091 per pound in 2019 to $525 last year. The industry suffered because eels are almost exclusively a restaurant product, and the pandemic shuttered restaurants the world over, said Mitchell Feigenbaum, an elver dealer.

But the recovery of the economy in China, a major buyer, bodes well for this season, Feigenbaum said.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Gloucester Daily Times

MAINE: Elver quotas to remain flat

January 20, 2021 — The Maine Department of Resources has released its 2021 elver quotas for license holders and they look the same as those in place for 2020, merely updating the years referred to in the 2020 rule.

“2021 allocations for individuals who held a license in 2020 will be the same as their 2019 allocation,” the proposed rule states. Any excess that is not allocated to new license holders will be “distributed evenly to all existing license holders.”

However, what is new is a proposed “tending requirement,” requiring that the contents of fyke nets and Sheldon box traps be removed at least once every 16 hours. The theory behind the proposed rule is that if fishermen regularly check their nets and traps, the risk of bycatch and elver mortality will decrease.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American

Baby Eel Fishermen Hope for Year Free of Poaching, Shutdowns

March 25, 2019 — Maine fishermen began several weeks of taking to rivers and streams to fish for baby eels Friday, which marked the start of a high-stakes season harvesters hope isn’t interrupted by poaching concerns as it was a year ago.

Fishermen in Maine use nets to harvest baby eels, called elvers, to feed demand from Asian aquaculture companies, who use them as seed stock.

The tiny eels are the source of one of the most valuable fisheries in the country on a per-pound basis, and they were worth a record of more than $2,300 per pound last year. Maine’s home to the only significant elver fishery in the country.

Last year’s season was shut down two weeks early by state regulators after investigators found that illegal sales had caused Maine to blow past its quota for the eels. New controls on the fishery are expected to clamp down on clandestine sales, and the use of a swipe card system to record transactions remains in effect.

Darrell Young, co-director of the Maine Elver Fishermen Association, said the health of the fishery also depends on members of the industry “behaving themselves” this time around.

“Buyers wanted to find their way around the swipe cards. They just made it harder for everybody else,” Young said.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The New York Times

Maine’s elver season shut down 2 weeks early as off-book sales disrupt quota

May 24, 2018 — State regulators are shutting down the lucrative elver fishery two weeks early, after Maine Marine Patrol investigators concluded that off-the-books sales of the valuable commodity have pushed the statewide catch beyond the legal limit.

Elver dealers and fishermen are supposed to use an electronic swipe-card system that allows accurate, real-time tracking by state regulators, but some dealers are paying less than the going rate – around $2,400 per pound – for cash sales of the baby eels, which are raised to adulthood at aquaculture facilities in Asia and sold to the seafood market as a delicacy.

“The future of this lucrative fishery is now in question,” Department of Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Keliher said in a prepared statement. “We clearly have to consider additional measures to ensure that Maine can remain compliant with (catch limits), that we can continue to protect our state’s valuable marine resources, and that we can hold accountable anyone who chooses to squander the opportunity those resources represent.”

The decision is a blow to the reputation of the fishery, said Darrell Young, co-director of the Maine Elver Fishermen Association, who founded the group five years ago to push back against efforts to shut the fishery down completely. Since then, Young said he’s worked hard to drive out bad actors, and he had planned to advocate at meetings with federal regulators next month for a catch limit of more than 11,000 pounds, a reset to the 2014 level.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

 

Elver prices soar to new heights amid shortage, Asian demand

March 30, 2018 — PORTLAND, Maine — The price of baby eels in Maine is soaring to record highs at the start of a season in which buyers expect to pay more for the valuable fish.

Baby eels, called elvers, are an important part of the worldwide Japanese food trade. Maine fishermen harvest them from rivers and streams so they can be sold as seed stock to Asian aquaculture companies.

The average price per pound to fishermen through the first week of the 2018 season was $2,608, the Maine Department of Marine Resources said Friday. The most elvers have ever sold for in a full season was $2,172 per pound, in 2015, and they sold for a little more than $1,300 per pound last year.

Fishermen in Maine, which has the only significant elver fishery in the U.S., are poised for high prices this year because of a poor harvest in Asia. The early part of Maine’s season has been held back somewhat by bad weather, but harvesters are looking forward to a good year, said Darrell Young, co-director of the Maine Elver Fishermen Association.

“Hoping that when there’s eels around, they fight over them,” Young said. “When mother nature decides she wants to turn around.”

The season opened March 22, and fishermen had about 95 percent of their 9,688 pound quota remaining through Thursday evening, the state marine agency reported on its website. The season runs until June 7, and the first week was somewhat slow, which fishermen expected at the end of a cold winter.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

 

MAINE: Elver season opens with new laws in place

March 24, 2016 — ELLSWORTH, Maine — Maine’s elver fishing season opened at just after midnight on Tuesday morning chilled by the first spring snowfall and the prospect of a weak market.

Many of Maine’s ponds and rivers are ice-free after an exceptionally mild winter and some harvesters had reported seeing elvers — more properly glass eels — moving into fresh water after their long ocean journey from the Sargasso Sea, where the juvenile eels hatched. Until Monday, harvesters had been anticipating an early start to the fishing season.

“There’s been a few eels in the brooks,” Franklin elver harvester Darrell Young said Monday afternoon as he scouted the shore of Hog Bay for a spot to set his fyke net once the season opened at midnight. “Some brooks are as warm or warmer than the ocean. The snow will cool things off. Things will slow down until it warms up.”

Young is one of the founders of the Maine Elver Fishermen Association and one of the leaders in the state’s battles with federal regulators to control the fishery.

While the water will almost certainly grow warmer, longtime elver buyer Bill Sheldon said that the situation in the principal markets for Maine elvers is likely to cast a chill over the price fishermen are paid for their catch.

“The Chinese and Asian economies in general are terrible,” Sheldon said Tuesday morning as he prepared to welcome the harvesters he expected to bring him their first elver landings late that night. “It’s going to reflect on the market for sure, and on the price we’re going to get for our eels.”

Maine elvers, just a tiny segment of the world market, are shipped primarily to farms in China and Taiwan, where they grow for about a year before they are processed into kabayki. Popular throughout much of Asia, the eels are gutted, boned and butterflied, then cut into square fillets that are skewered, dipped in seasoned soy sauce and broiled.

According to Sheldon, the poor economy has cut demand for kabayaki and, consequently, for elvers. Farmers who bought elvers last year are having trouble selling the mature eels they’ve raised.

“Everyone’s cutting back and it’s showing up right now,” he said.

That could be bad news for Maine elver harvesters.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American

Weather gives fishermen hope for ultra-pricey baby eel catch

PORTLAND, Maine (March 17, 2016) — Maine’s annual rush to catch valuable baby eels prized by expensive restaurants and Asian markets likely will be more successful this year because of warmer weather, fishermen say.

Baby eels cost more at the dock than any other fishery in the state, and are among the most lucrative in the country, sometimes fetching more than $2,000 per pound. Maine has the only significant baby eel fishery in the country, and the season begins Tuesday.

But Maine’s baby eel, or elver, fishermen are coming off a difficult year. Fishermen caught less than 5,300 pounds of the baby eels against a quota of nearly 10,000 in 2015. Many fishermen blamed the slow year on a cold spring, in which the rivers where elvers swim in the spring still were frozen in late March.

Prospects are much better for this year, because rivers are running and temperatures are higher, said Rep. Jeffrey Pierce, a Dresden Republican and adviser to the Maine Elver Fishermen Association.

“There’s every reason to expect everyone will catch their quota,” Pierce said. “Last year at this time we were still snowmobiling on the Kennebec River.”

See the full story from the Associated Press at The Day

MAINE: Elver fishermen unite as tribes agree to new rules

March 9, 2016 — ROCKPORT — Last year, Maine fishermen harvested elvers worth more than $11.4 million from the state’s streams and rivers. That made the fishery for the tiny, translucent juvenile eels the fourth most valuable in the state, but it still wasn’t a good year.

A cold, dry spring delayed the migration of elvers from the sea into the rivers where harvesters set their gear. As a result, Maine fishermen landed just 5,259 pounds of the tiny wrigglers, little more than half the 9,688-pound quota allocated the state by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

The good news was that those elvers were worth $2,171 per pound to the harvesters fortunate enough to catch some.

When the Maine Elver Fishermen Association gathered for its annual meeting Saturday morning, harvesters received some good news from Department of Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Keliher and former MEFA Executive Director Jeffrey Pierce.

Emergency legislation enacted that morning should give fishermen a better chance to actually fill the quota, and Keliher said he also hoped it would reduce friction over the elver fishery between the state and Maine’s four tribal governments.

Of immediate consequence, the new law extends the elver season, which begins on Tuesday, March 22, from May 31 to June 7 and allows fishing every day of the week. Under the prior law, the fishery was closed on weekends as a conservation measure.

Initially, LD1502 gave Keliher flexibility to set the 48-hour closures before the season to take account of the tides and minimize the impact on the industry. With fishing limited by a fixed quota since 2014, though, the closure became unnecessary.

The legislation also allows licensed fishermen to chose before each season starts what type of gear they will use — fyke nets or dip nets. It does not, however, authorize the use of more gear.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American