Inside the Slimy, Smelly, Secretive World of Glass-Eel Fishing

· Each spring, hundreds of millions of baby eels swarm the waterways of coastal Maine. Soaring global demand incited an era of jackpot payouts and international poaching.

· There are only four hundred and twenty-five fishermen in Maine who are licensed to harvest baby American eels, known as elvers or glass eels, as they make their spring runs from the ocean to freshwater. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, there is a seemingly insatiable demand for the animals, which are raised in tanks to their adult size of two-to-three feet, big enough to be eaten. The math is pretty straightforward: glass eels have been called “likely the most valuable fish in the United States on a per-pound basis.” As Paige Williams reports in this week’s issue, “during a favorable market and a hard elver run, a Mainer may earn a hundred thousand dollars in a single haul.” As prices have spiked in recent years, so too have stories of caginess, conflict, and criminality in Maine, which has the nation’s only significant elver fishery. Williams documents plenty of tension and competition—“If you’re pullin’ a hundred pounds a night, you ain’t showing nobody that,” one elverman explains. Yet she evokes the rewards of fishing that go beyond the money—feelings of wonder that begin with the slimy, beguiling, and still largely mysterious eels themselves

The Sargasso Sea, a warm, calm expanse of the North Atlantic Ocean, is bordered not by land but by four strong currents—a gyre. Vast mats of prickly brown seaweed float so thickly on the windless surface that Christopher Columbus worried about his ships getting stuck. The biodiverse sanctuary within and beneath the sargassum produces Anguilla rostrata, the American eel. Each female lays some eight million eggs. The eggs hatch as ribbonlike larvae that drift to the Gulf Stream, which carries them to the continental shelf. By the time they reach Maine, the larvae have transformed into swimmers about the length of an index finger, with the circumference of a bean sprout and the translucence of a jellyfish. Hence their nickname, glass eels, also known as elvers. The glass eel is barely visible, but for a dark stripe—its developing backbone—and a couple of chia seeds for eyes. “Ghosts on the water,” a Maine fisherman once called them. Travelling almost as one, like a swarm or a murmuration, glass eels enter tidal rivers and push upstream, pursuing the scent of freshwater until, ideally, they reach a pond and commence a long, tranquil life of bottom-feeding. Elvers mature into adults two to three feet in length, with the girth and the coloring of a slimy bicycle tire. Then, one distant autumn, on some unknown cue, they return to the Sargasso, where they spawn and die.

Maine has thirty-five hundred miles of coastline, including coves, inlets, and bays, plus hundreds of tidal rivers, thousands of streams, and what has been described as “an ungodly amount of brooks.” Hundreds of millions of glass eels arrive each spring, as the waters warm. Four hundred and twenty-five licensed elvermen are allowed to harvest slightly more than seven thousand five hundred pounds of them during a strictly regulated fishing season, which runs from late March to early June. Four Native American tribes may legally fish another two thousand or so pounds, with more than half of that amount designated for the Passamaquoddy, who have lived in Maine and eastern Canada for some twelve thousand years. Maine is the only state with a major elver fishery. South Carolina has a small one (ten licensed elvermen), but everywhere else, in an effort to preserve the species, elver fishing is a federal crime.

The elvermen sell their catch to state-licensed buyers, who in turn sell to customers in Asia. The baby eels are shipped live, mostly to Hong Kong, in clear plastic bags of water and pure oxygen, like a sophisticated twist on pet-store goldfish. They live in carefully tended tanks and ponds at aquaculture farms until they are big enough to be eaten. Japan alone annually consumes at least a hundred thousand tons of freshwater eel, unagi, which is widely enjoyed kabayaki style—butterflied, marinated, and grilled.

The American eel became a valuable commodity as overfishing, poaching, and other forms of human interference led to the decline of similar species in Japan (Anguilla japonica) and Europe (Anguilla anguilla). Those species are now red-listed as, respectively, endangered and critically endangered. The U.S. has not declared the American eel endangered, and fishermen want to keep it that way.

In March, 2011, just before elver season started in Maine, a tsunami in Japan decimated aquaculture ponds, driving the price of American glass eels from about two hundred dollars per pound to nearly nine hundred by the season’s closing day. The next year, the price reached one thousand eight hundred and sixty-nine dollars per pound, and soon topped two thousand. National Fisherman calls glass eels “likely the most valuable fish in the United States on a per-pound basis.” A recent issue of Marine Policy cited “unprecedented demand” for American eel. Only lobster outranks it in Maine.

During a favorable market and a hard elver run, a Mainer may earn a hundred thousand dollars in a single haul. Each license holder is assigned a quota, ranging from four pounds to more than a hundred, based partly on seniority. Even the lowest quota insures a payout of six thousand dollars if the price per pound breaches fifteen hundred, which happens with some regularity. Maine is the only place in the country where a kid can become eligible for an elver license at fifteen and win a shot at making more money overnight, swinging a net, than slinging years’ worth of burgers. Elvermen have sent their children to college on eels, and have used the income to improve their homes, their businesses, their boobs. This year, more than forty-five hundred Mainers applied for sixteen available licenses.

One frosty evening in April, an elverman named Sam Glass turned onto a dead-end road in the state’s northernmost coastal region, Down East, and parked beside a stream. The water was about thirty feet wide, with boulders across it and trees on the other side. The stream feeds West Bay, which leads to the Atlantic, whose tide swells and then shrinks the river’s volume every twelve hours. Glass, a tall, reserved fifty-year-old with dark, curly hair and a trim beard, pulled five hand-chopped maple poles from the bed of his pickup truck and carried them down the riverbank. Next, he fetched a plastic bucket, nylon cord, coils of rope, two boat anchors, and a fyke net. Unfurled, the net, made of pale, fine-gauge mesh, resembled a Chinese lantern trailed by two oversized streamers, or a mutant sea creature with a barrel-shaped head.

Glass, wearing waders, sloshed into the water and fastened a rope around a boulder, securing the barrel, called the tail bag, at the foot of a gentle rapids. Back on land, he hooked a streamer to one of the maple poles, which he’d stabbed into the earth as a stanchion. The streamer now resembled a wing, hemmed at the top with tubular buoys and weighted at the bottom with chains and one of the boat anchors. To pull the wing taut, Glass roped it to a spruce, then went to work on the other streamer. The net took shape as an ocean-facing funnel, hugging the shore.

The high-tide line showed on the riverbank like a shadow on a wall. In about six hours, the water would rise again, submerging the tail bag and the bottom half of the wings. Glass was working to beat the setting sun and to harness the pull of the moon. If he had set a good net, baby eels would swim right into his trap.

Elvers avoid strong currents by keeping to the sides of rivers, the way mice follow baseboards. Glass long ago learned to look for “pinch points,” where the eels are likely to pass within two feet of shore. For the better part of two hours, he cut cord, tied clove hitches, positioned the anchors, tweaked the lean of the stanchions. Hawks and bald eagles were circling, and watching from tree branches. He finished after sundown, his exhalations visible in the beam of his headlamp. “That’s about it,” he said, and walked back up the riverbank, through the bulrush and thorn. A block of dislodged snow slipped downstream, pinballing through the boulders and passing beneath a bridge, beyond which other elvermen had just finished setting their nets. Glass went home to wait for high water.