Baby eels have changed fortunes for Maine’s fishermen

On tidal rivers and streams that course through coastal Maine, where salt- and freshwater collide, people wearing headlamps are flocking to the water’s edge in the middle of the night like 19th-century miners sifting the earth for specks of gold. They’re searching for baby eels, better known as elvers, pound for pound one of the most expensive live fish in the world. The first time Julie Keene caught $33,000 worth of baby eels in a single night, she started crying because she thought she’d done something wrong. She hauled her bucket of eels up the riverbank in the darkness and handed it off to a buyer, who tried to give her a thick wad of cash in exchange for the squirming pile of translucent sea creatures, which look like long, skinny tadpoles. At first, though, she was too frightened to take the money. Maine’s eel boom kicked into high gear in 2012, when the price of elvers reached as high as $2,600 a pound after a devastating tsunami wiped out many of Japan’s eel farms, where wild-born eels are raised. But demand for the young eels, also called glass eels because they are transparent, has been rising for years as endangered European eels and depleted Japanese eels disappear. In the United States, where the eel population has been declared stable by the Fish and Wildlife Service, Maine is the only state that still has a thriving elver fishing industry. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, however, has deemed the American eel population endangered.