# Inside the Slimy, Smelly, Secretive World of Glass-Eel Fishing
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.
Glass grew up in a cedar-shingled house on ten acres near Dyer Bay, and still lives there today. He keeps fyke nets strung up near his apple trees and piled in a greenhouse, where he’s been restoring his late father’s lobster boat. He got burned out on lobstering a while ago and fantasizes about piloting the boat to the Bahamas. He prefers eeling to lobstering, and travelling to almost anything.
A couple of years ago, Glass and another elverman, Ryan Loughran, went into business together as licensed elver buyers. They partnered with a Korean businessman who wanted to stake a local broker and guarantee a shippable supply. Loughran and Glass augmented their own fishing by taking a commission on each transaction. When I asked why not sell directly to Hong Kong, bypassing the middlemen, another fisherman who overheard the question said, “It isn’t done.”
Glass has other entrepreneurial interests, including turning a cottage that he built when he was twenty into an Airbnb property. Aside from a shipyard pension, eeling constitutes Loughran’s entire livelihood. He is a gregarious father of three in his forties who always wears a baseball cap and, because of a nerve disorder, walks with a cane. When he was a boy, his father, an eeler, advised him to get a fishing license in case glass eels ever became valuable, never expecting a disaster on the other side of the world to produce Florida-condo money, comfortable-retirement money. In the early boom days of eeling, armed buyers roamed the coast with aerated tanks and a tantalizing amount of bundled cash, paying for elvers straight out of the water.
The Maine Department of Marine Resources now required fishermen to sell their catch at a fixed address. Glass’s home wasn’t particularly conducive to handling customers, so he reached out to the patriarch of a respected fishing family who lived in a more convenient location, with a wide gravel driveway and a stand-alone garage. Glass had known the patriarch’s wife since grade school. The patriarch captained a range of vessels and wore jackets embroidered with the name of his forty-two-foot Duffy. “I scallop, I lobster, I eel,” he told me one night. I wondered what happens when two competing boats show up at the same fishing grounds—who wins? The patriarch said, “Whoever’s got the biggest balls and the biggest red knife.” A lobsterman standing next to him nodded solemnly.
The patriarch agreed to rent Glass and Loughran his garage as a buying station. (His name isn’t mentioned here because he wouldn’t allow it, but he tolerated my hanging around.) This year, in late March, they brought in tanks, aerators, nets, buckets, folding tables, and a portable scale. In one corner, near a “*TRUMP* 2020” banner, they installed a chest-high tank, which resembled a one-person hot tub. Someone chalked “$900” on a blackboard.
Demand in Asia drives the price, but the floor is set locally by a small group of buyers whose names are known and whose conversations, I was told, are private. Nine hundred dollars per pound was the lowest opening price in years. (Loughran had heard that there was a “bottleneck” in Hong Kong.) As the season progresses, the price climbs in twenty-five- or fifty-dollar increments. Each change is posted in Elverholics, a popular fishing forum on Facebook. Some fishermen sell early and low, just to get money in hand. Those who won’t even consider taking less than fifteen hundred dollars a pound respond with yawn emojis and exhortations to “HOOOLLLDDDD!!!!” as they wait for the price-setters to turn on one another.
In early spring, there’s little for fishermen in Maine to do other than catch bait herring and prepare boats and drags. The clam flats are still thawing. Eeling, theoretically, bridges the gap between seasons. Glass eels hate turbulence, and cold water stupefies them. They seem to run hardest under a full or new moon, in warmer weather, which may not come until May or June, by which time the season is nearly over. This year, rain and snow had left the rivers frothy and high. Eelers were pulling their nets to avoid losing them to the blow. Leaving baby eels trapped in churn was “like puttin’’em through a washing machine,” the patriarch told me.
Loughran set up a makeshift bar in the garage. One night, he invited a bunch of people over. I walked in to find about a dozen fishermen, drinks in hand. Loughran was sitting behind his scale, his laptop open. School had been cancelled for the next day, because of another incoming snowstorm. Bottles of Bacardi Limón and Skrewball peanut-butter whiskey were being drained.
In the corner, Glass was running an aquarium net through the holding tank, cleaning out dead eels and searching for killers. The elver’s mortal enemies include trout and raccoons, but eelers most despise sea lice, fingertip-size crustaceans that look as lovely as their name. The lice bite the eels; the eels die. The patriarch fished a brown louse from a garbage barrel, where it had been clinging to the side of an empty Miller Lite box, and showed it to me: “Even that *one* will cause mass destruction.”
The patriarch often eats scallops out of the shell on his boat. He plucked a baby eel from the tank and swallowed it alive. Glass, who is known for his ability to stomach anything, did the same, and said, “Not much taste to ’em.” This was an old trick sometimes performed for nosy outsiders. Eleven years ago, an elverman downed a live eel in front of a BuzzFeed reporter and claimed that it tried to crawl back up his throat.
In the human palm, a living mass of glass eels feels like a cold pile of squirm. In captivity, they resemble restless black threads, or pepper that has learned how to move. Eels enjoy density, and often cuddle up in piles. With each scoop of the net, elvers wriggled onto Glass’s wrist before appearing to leap back into the water. Glass said, joking a little, “This was the funnest business in the world, but the government doesn’t want to see you have fun *or* make money. We used to be able to go at it unlimited.”
“A free-for-all,” the patriarch said.
Licensed fishermen could once set as many fykes and catch as many glass eels as they wanted, using a net of any size or type. The patriarch showed me a cell-phone video of someone dumping a funky gumbo of overage back into a river, to comply with the state’s limits. The price at the time was twenty-two hundred dollars per pound. The eels would have fetched more than ninety grand.
Like lobster, eel was popular for its affordability and protein before it became an expensive delicacy. In the U.K., elvers are scrambled with eggs. In the Basque country, elvers *a la bilbaína* are fried in olive oil with chili peppers and garlic. The Scandinavians smoke eels. The Maori roast them in leaves. *The Economist* once noted that the cooking encyclopedia “Larousse Gastronomique,” published in 1938, contains forty-five different recipes for eel. (“To kill an eel, seize it with a cloth and bang its head violently against a hard surface.”) Cocktail garnishes are typically inanimate (and non-sentient), but I recently saw a Facebook video of glass eels wriggling around in, supposedly, a cup of sake.
Years ago, John Wyatt Greenlee was working on a doctorate in medieval history when he became intrigued by seventeenth-century maps of London, which showed images of “eel ships” anchored in the Thames. The Dutch had been selling salted eel to England since at least the fourteenth century, and now delivered them live. Calling himself “Surprised Eel Historian, PhD,” Greenlee took his findings to Twitter, attracting tens of thousands of followers with trivia (early Britons could pay their rent in eels), cheek (“Eel on Twitter > Elon Twitter”), and activism (“Eels are also a super-important part of stream ecologies”). Greenlee told me, “It’s not a panda, or something big and majestic, and it’s not a cute otter. Eels are slimy, weird, snakelike things. But they’re an umbrella species. Saving them means saving broad swaths of habitat from the ocean all the way up to the headwaters.”
Previous eel obsessives have included Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, Linnaeus, and Freud, who published one of his first papers, in 1877, on eels. (He dissected hundreds of them in a futile search for clues to how they reproduce.) Contemporary biologists know more about the eel’s reproductive system than Freud did, but the sex life of eels is still a secret that plays out within the pressurized depths of the Sargasso. Despite numerous attempts, no one has ever seen them mate in the wild, or managed to document the hatching of eggs outside of captivity.
The freshwater eel “has a complex life history, parts of which are still shrouded in mystery,” Jonna Tomkiewicz, a senior researcher at the National Institute of Aquatic Resources, in Denmark, explained in one of many papers she’s written on the subject. Do the larvae live on gelatinous plankton? Marine snow? Where in the water column do they feed? Without this kind of knowledge, researchers are “often operating in the dark.” In “Under the Sea-Wind,” Rachel Carson observed that when the American eel returned to its sargassum patch to die it “passed from human sight and almost from human knowledge.” In his book “Eels,” James Prosek, whom the *Times* has dubbed “a kind of underwater Audubon,” calls this final swim “among the greatest unseen migrations of any creature on the planet.”
For adult eels, the trip often involves surviving the turbine blades of hydroelectric dams. A Maine elverman named Randy Bushey once reported finding migrating eels “chopped up in perfect, one-foot chunks.” Brian Altvater, Sr., a member of the Passamaquoddy Tribe who is working to restore healthy fish runs to the Schoodic River, on the Canadian border, has pushed for the removal of dams by arguing that “they generate very little electricity compared to the damage that they do to the entire ecosystem.”
Elvers are the key to eel aquaculture farming, given the difficulty, as yet, of captive breeding and scalable hatcheries. Japan, which now imports two-thirds of its eel stock, was eying the American eel as early as 1970. The following spring, William Sheldon, a young employee of the Maine Department of Marine Resources with a new degree in wildlife management, embarked on a study to see if the state’s elver numbers could support a fishery. He found more than enough, and in a report that is still referenced today, he detailed his observations along with one of his fishing inventions, the “Sheldon trap.” (A net with a mesh size “somewhat smaller than ordinary window screening” appeared to work best.) Sheldon also described how to harvest, hold, and transport elvers without killing them. The document was foundational to the fishery that exists today.
When Maine’s elver season starts, every March 22nd, eelers pray for warm weather. Some toss a coin in their chosen river, for luck. A couple of days before the opening in 2012, the year after the tsunami in Japan boosted prices, the temperature reached the low eighties, far above average. Julie Keene, a veteran eeler from Lubec, at the northeastern tip of the contiguous United States, got a sunburn and fourteen glass eels. That time of year, the typical number was zero, because the rivers were usually still full of ice. Within a couple of days, she had caught about forty-five thousand—eighteen pounds, a personal best. On the Union River, in Ellsworth, the capital of Down East eeling, fishermen were said to have caught more than a million dollars’ worth of glass eels in a single night.
The next year, the fishing was still so good that one elverman tattooed his forearm with an eel, dollar signs, and “2013,” memorializing a record season that afforded him, among other things, a new four-wheeler. Rural Mainers could work their entire lives and never see big money, especially all at once, especially Down East, where the median household income was about thirty-six thousand dollars.
Jackpot payouts, in cash, fomented a wild period of interstate elver poaching. Saboteurs sliced their competitors’ nets. Untended buckets got taken. Thieves would detach entire tail bags and run off with them. Loughran’s father used to have him camp beside their “honey hole” around the clock. A splash in the night, or “hootin’ and hollerin’,” as one eeler put it, was the sound of fishermen throwing one another into the drink. “There were just *hundreds* of people poaching,” Darrell Young, a prominent elverman, told a filmmaker. Another, Rick Sibley, said that eeling “didn’t bring the community together—it tore people apart.”
By 2014, the state had imposed its quota, capped the number of elver licenses, limited eelers to two nets, banned cash transactions (buyers must pay with checks), and implemented a swipe-card system to monitor eelers’ individual hauls in real time. The regulations were devised in collaboration with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, a long-standing interstate body that works with federal agencies to maintain a sustainable industry. Poaching quieted down. Fishermen who had let their license expire kicked themselves when, in 2018, the price of elvers peaked at twenty-eight hundred dollars a pound. Now it was possible to get back in only through a state lottery.
A fourth-generation sardine packer, Keene started fishing glass eels decades ago, when it paid barely twenty dollars a pound. After the price spiked, she and her longtime boyfriend were able to buy two new trucks, plant an orchard, and build a barn and a garage. “It’s changed our life,” she said, in an interview for an oral-history project in 2014. “And then let’s look at how it’s contributing to the rest of the state. We paid sixty thousand dollars in taxes last year. That’s enough money to support five families on welfare.”
Keene, who considered herself a good steward of Maine’s natural resources, told the historian that she had watched “a complete gold rush” nearly destroy sea urchins in the late eighties and early nineties, and that she didn’t want to see the same thing happen to eels or any other species. “I believe in having a future,” she said. That future already seemed compromised by factors unrelated to conservation. Keene described pervasive drug abuse and a “lot of alcoholism” Down East, where, as in many rural areas, it can be hard to get help. (A record seven hundred and twenty-three Mainers died of overdoses in 2022.) Keene said, “How does a local community hold on just by their fingernails, you know?”
Responsible fishermen don’t disapprove of rules; they simply want more of a say in making them. Regulators were worried about the American eel’s decline, but fishermen were seeing elvers in what Keene called “Biblical” numbers. Eelers wondered if the regulators were perhaps looking in the wrong place, or conducting their census on nights when eels didn’t “go.” Keene said, “Just because they didn’t go doesn’t mean they’re not there.” No one seemed to know exactly how many elvers there were, or whether any decrease in population was caused by overfishing or more properly attributable to the turbine gantlet and other hazards. Jason Bartlett, a Maine Department of Marine Resources biologist who specializes in eels, told me that he is increasingly worried about a swim-bladder parasite that messes with an eel’s buoyancy: “If they can’t get off the bottom, they’re going to die before they get back to the Sargasso.” The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in its most recent significant assessment of *A.**rostrata,* acknowledged a decline but indicated that “the American eel population is not subject to threats that would imperil its continued existence.”
The A.S.M.F.C. has never increased Maine’s over-all quota. Individual quotas are not made public, and fishermen reveal their number about as quickly as they give up their favorite fishing spot. Some of those who remember the unregulated days bristle at any limit (“Fishermen always grumble,” one elverman told me), but they were especially infuriated when the lottery was introduced, in 2013, and their quotas stagnated while the state admitted newcomers. Keene said, at the time, “How is that rewarding someone that’s been in this fishery, that breathes that fishery? That makes their own gear, that is dependent on it, that understands it, that respects it? I still have a license because I obey the law. How is that rewarding good faith?”
Glass eels are an ideal target for subterfuge, because they run at night and because once they’re out of the water it is impossible to prove where they came from. The risk-reward ratio makes them irresistible. Eel smuggling, reportedly a four-billion-dollar-a-year trade spanning at least three continents, has been called the world’s least known but most profitable wildlife crime. (The G-7’s Financial Action Task Force, a watchdog federation of thirty-nine countries, has identified wildlife trafficking as a “major transnational” racket, on par with arms dealing and drug running.) Glass eels are among the most bootlegged protected species in Europe. In 2021, an investigation into the assassination of the Haitian President Jovenel Moïse revealed that his government had been bearing down on traffickers of narcotics, weapons—and eels. Moïse believed that the eel trade should be regulated and taxed, the *Times* reported, noting, “Many of the eels go to China, but the Haitian police are investigating the industry as a way to launder illicit profits.”
Glass eels have been found in passengers’ luggage at airports in Amsterdam and Brussels. In 2017, British border agents checked cargo bound for Hong Kong and discovered, hidden beneath a batch of iced fish, four hundred and forty pounds of illicitly harvested elvers. Half were dead. The smuggler had allegedly spent two years trafficking more than five million eels, with a market value of nearly seventy million dollars. He used a warehouse in Gloucestershire as a way station, and the eels had been sourced in Spain. Smugglers there have operated in Algeciras and Tarifa, at the southern tip of the continent, just across the Strait of Gibraltar from Morocco, which has restricted elver fishing since 2011.
Although *A. anguilla* tends to be the most trafficked eel species, in 2022, Hong Kong alone imported almost twenty-eight thousand pounds of *rostrata* from the United States, according to Hiromi Shiraishi, a researcher at Chuo University. The amount far exceeded the quotas in Maine and South Carolina combined. When I asked Maine’s fishing commissioner, Patrick Keliher, to explain the discrepancy, he told me, through a spokesperson, “Elvers from Maine are being tracked very closely, and it’s our belief that if there are additional elvers entering the supply chain, it’s because of the illegal activity that has been so prevalent in Canada the last two years.”
In Canada, glass eels are the most valuable seafood by weight. Last year, a woman who lived near Hubbards Cove, in Nova Scotia, was alarmed to wake at three in the morning to see men outside, in balaclavas, taking glass eels from a stream. In another incident, a dispute over eels ended with one man reportedly assaulting another with a pipe. Canada’s minister of fisheries and oceans temporarily shut down the country’s fishery, saying, “It was simply too dangerous to let this continue.”
Elver fishing in Canada was cancelled again this year, but eelers went on eeling. (By late April, the authorities had charged ninety-five people with doing so, including five Mainers.) First Nation members argued that treaty rights exempted them from federal regulations. In a Facebook video, a First Nation fisherman named Cory Francis announced plans to set fykes on the Annis River in Yarmouth County, Nova Scotia, a hundred and twenty-two miles across the Gulf of Maine, and declared Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans a “criminal element” and a “rogue group.” Accusing the agency of “racially profiling Indigenous people,” he said, “You can go fuck off.”
Not long after conducting his seminal elver study, Sheldon, the Maine Department of Marine Resources employee, left government service to become a lobsterman. His boat sank, and he turned to eeling. He both fished and operated as a buyer, once explaining to a TV news station, “The small man can get into it.” The license plate on his truck read “*EEL WAGN*.” A sign in his headquarters, in Ellsworth, said “Smoking is permitted here in the shop. Lying is to be expected. Everyone welcome here.”
Sheldon often talked to the media. He was the one who swallowed a live eel in front of the BuzzFeed reporter. In that reporter’s profile, published in 2013, we find Sheldon in his sixties, with both a flare gun and a 40-calibre Glock, serving bucket-bearing customers at a temporary headquarters set up in a cheap motel room. He’s on the phone with “Chinese guys who wired him $600,000 on handshake deals.” The year before, Sheldon had “paid his fishermen $12 million for elvers (about a third of the estimated $40 million paid out in Maine over the season).”
What few knew then was that federal agents had launched an interstate poaching investigation, called Operation Broken Glass. Baby eels were being harvested up and down the East Coast in places that banned elver fishing, and passed off as having come from Maine. Dealers were knowingly buying and selling illicit elvers, learning only too late that they’d been talking to undercover officers. Twenty-one men were ultimately charged with trafficking more than five million dollars’ worth of glass eels.
Sheldon was one of them. By the time federal agents raided his business, he was considered the grandfather of the industry in Maine. Sheldon had “cornered the market, basically,” a fellow-elverman later said. In federal court, a prosecutor noted, “By his own pronouncement and by the consensus of the community, he knows more about elver fishing than anyone.”
In October, 2017, Sheldon pleaded guilty to trafficking two hundred and sixty-eight pounds of glass eels from states where elver fishing is illegal. “Bill Sheldon not only facilitated a black market in illegal elvers—he encouraged it,” the federal prosecutor said, at sentencing. “He didn’t just buy illegal elvers—he provided poachers with advice and equipment. He didn’t just dodge the law himself—he told other people what to say if they got caught.” The prosecutor told the judge, “This was just greed.”
In court, Sheldon minimized, as defendants do. He claimed to have made, at most, thirty thousand dollars on his crime, and expressed shame and regret for “poor judgment.” His lawyer requested home confinement instead of incarceration, arguing that Sheldon was a good, stable person: married for nearly fifty years, a father of two, a grandfather of four, no prior felonies. Hardships were enumerated: a sick father, the sunk boat. Worst of all, Sheldon’s daughter Deb had killed herself as his case unfolded. Sheldon told the judge, “I will forever feel like I was responsible.”
Sheldon was sentenced to six months in prison and three years of probation—a fitting punishment, the judge said, for “significant deception” and for helping to create and clandestinely support a black market. His probation ended a few years ago. He gave up his dealer license but was allowed to keep fishing, and went to work for a Maine-based company co-owned by Mitchell Feigenbaum, a former Philadelphia lawyer who moved to Canada decades ago to become an eel exporter. Feigenbaum had testified on Sheldon’s behalf at sentencing, and tried to differentiate him from the “rough, tough, mean, nasty, hard individuals” typical of their industry. He told the judge, “Our product is all going to one place. It’s the Chinese government. State-owned industries are pretty much our sole consumer for this product. They want it as cheap as possible. They will engage in predatory practices that would make your head spin, including a lot of the poaching.”
Although Sheldon remains an influential figure in eeling, he no longer takes questions. (He did not respond to mine.) He and his supporters blamed “the media” for the death of his daughter—a mother of two, a registered nurse, a Steelers fan who refused to shit-talk the Patriots, a smoker who was trying to quit, an alcoholic who already had. “The various stories about Bill and the stress it brought to the family had a negative impact,” one of his defense documents said.
The Sheldon case left a lot of fishermen even more wary than usual. Loughran told me, “It’s a fragile industry, and bad publicity could be very detrimental to it.” Last year, when I initially expressed interest in writing about glass eels, someone posted on Facebook, “I smell Fed.” One person liked the comment: Sheldon.
On a recent night, the patriarch and his son drove to a back-road bridge north of Acadia National Park and parked downslope on a concrete boat ramp. The headlamps of their truck illuminated little more than a wedge of flotsam. The only other light was the sickly twinkle off a scattering of stars. As I crossed the bridge on foot, it was so dark that I could have walked into an elephant.
The men were wearing waders, hoodies, and yellow rubber gloves up to their elbows. One of them flicked on a powerful flashlight. From the bridge, I watched them traverse an inhospitable stretch of beach and climb the jagged riprap, moving toward the bridge piling where their fyke net was tethered. The outgoing tide churned between the pilings with the noisy velocity of floodwaters. Grasping one of the tethers, the patriarch waded into the buffeting rush. He untied one end of the tail bag and emptied it into a plastic bait bucket that his son was holding. Then he re-tied the bag and secured the tether, and the two of them returned to the truck.
Back home, they found Loughran waiting at the garage. It was one-thirty in the morning. Eelers on the Presumpscot River, another elver stronghold, further south, were “*slaughtering*,” Loughran reported. That meant having a good night.
The patriarch’s son set an aquarium net over the top of an empty bucket and strained the first of their sludge. The pour revealed sea lice, krill, a needlefish, and a bunch of twitchy sticklebacks, as silver as store-bought fishing lures—bycatch, all of which gets returned to the river. Cupping the net from the bottom, the patriarch teased the few glass eels into view and plucked them out, the way you’d pick lint off a sweater. He said, “We have to work harder for ours than they do down in southern Maine. They don’t get out of bed for this little bit.” I understood what he meant when I later saw a video in which two eelers struggled to lift a tail bag so full that they might as well have been trying to move a body. “Holy mackerel,” one said. The other said, “Oh, my word.”
The second pour of the patriarch’s bucket writhed with eels—a pound and a half’s worth, all told. They moved the elvers into their holding tank and prepared to wait out the price the way an investor sits on a promising stock. The blackboard now said “$950.” It was hard to know what kind of payout they could ultimately expect, given the caginess surrounding pricing and quotas. (Buyers sometimes pay more than the publicized rate.) I’d once asked Loughran why all the secrecy, and he’d said, “If you’re pullin’ a hundred pounds a night, you ain’t showing *nobody* that.” Rivals would “set nets around every fucking inch of you.” Elvermen don’t like others watching their weigh-ins, either. Nobody wants the world to know that he just banked fifty grand.
Several days later, Loughran and Glass brought kimchi (a gift from their business partner) and fresh crabmeat over to Glass’s house. They were making crab rolls when I arrived. Glass stoked a fire in a woodstove and handed me a Heineken in a jelly jar. We ate some dried haddock as he prepared the rolls, which he served on square porcelain plates at the dining table, whose centerpiece was a chessboard. Afterward, Glass walked me out to the greenhouse and showed me his dad’s lobster boat, the Don’t Know. He was thinking of renaming it the Andromeda. In the distance we could hear the ocean. He said, “When it’s *real* rough, it sounds like a lion’s den.”
When we got back to the house, the patriarch and his wife were there, sitting with Loughran in Glass’s living room. Loughran told a story about killing twenty-seven rats in one night in his father’s barn and lining them up as evidence of an infestation; the corpses were gone by morning, having presumably been carried off and eaten by other rats. This led to talk of wharf rats, New York City rats, black widows, brown recluses, and the redback spiders of Australia, but, as inevitably happens with elvermen, the conversation returned to eels.
Like hunters, elvermen study and admire the animals that provide their livelihood. Glass and Loughran had recently asked Alexa about the lifespan of the American eel, marvelling that the answer was as many as forty-four years, the same age as Loughran. Because eels absorb oxygen through their skin, they can skirt a strong current by leaving the water briefly to climb rocks or scale a concrete dam. They may rest in a river’s calm pockets, waiting for the rising tide to help push them past white water before the next lunar cycle drags them back.
Loughran told me, “In China and Japan, there’s whole families that rely on this seed fish for *their* livelihoods as well.” (Aquaculture farming has existed in Asia since antiquity.) On Glass’s television, he cued up a YouTube video of an eel-farming operation in Taiwan. A doughy mass oozed out of a machine and hit the concrete floor like a dense blob of poo. Glass eels eat nothing—they don’t even have a mouth—but in the next stage of development, when they start to resemble garter snakes, they can be taught to expect “eel chow,” often some amalgam of fish proteins, oils, and blood. (This garter-snake stage is when glass eels technically become elvers, though fishermen almost always refer to the two interchangeably.) We watched a farmer quarter the blob and drop one of the chunks into a pond. It floated. Hundreds of mature eels attacked it from all sides. They were large and ropy, and you could hear them smacking. It was hard to believe that the baby eels in the patriarch’s garage would grow up eating the stuff in this video. “Yep,” the patriarch said, “and then we’re gonna eat them.” The U.S. imports eleven million pounds of eel annually, mostly from China. The elvers that get shipped to the other side of the world may wind up right back in Maine.
In the United States, according to a census conducted in 2018, there are seven eel farms—two fewer than there are frog farms. The only land-based eel aquaculture operation, American Unagi, is in Midcoast Maine. Sara Rademaker, an Indiana native who studied aquaculture at Auburn University, started the company ten years ago by test-raising elvers in her basement. She had been looking for a fish to farm when she realized how ludicrous it was that the only state with a major elver fishery had no one growing, processing, and selling its own valuable catch. Establishing such an enterprise would theoretically keep jobs and money Stateside, shrink the trade’s environmental footprint, and, if done right, provide accountability. (Rademaker told me that American Unagi uses no antibiotics or chemicals.)
Aquaculture farming, the fastest-growing sector of food production, is a global industry valued at more than three hundred billion dollars. It already provides half the world’s food and is projected to account for more as the planet’s human population hurtles toward ten billion in the next couple of decades. Twenty million people work in the aquaculture trade, many of them in developing nations. When someone recently asked Loughran why Maine elvermen don’t try to get a piece of the farming, he replied, “You’d need several million dollars just to gear up.”
A successful eel farm requires the careful balance of environmental factors: warmth, diet, oxygen, pH levels. In Maine, the right conditions must be simulated. An indoor operation such as Rademaker’s requires, to start, square footage, tanks, feeders, pumps, temperature control, filtration, and clean water flow. As the eels mature, workers continually separate the stock by size, so that they’ll feed correctly—and not on one another.
The Maine Department of Marine Resources assigned American Unagi a quota of two hundred pounds. Rademaker also buys elvers from local harvesters. She told me that black-market fishing is no longer a concern locally because of the state’s strict regulations and enforcement, and that eelers police themselves: “They’ll turn people in at the drop of a hat.”
American Unagi is headquartered in a new ten-million-dollar facility at an industrial park in the small town of Waldoboro. The company has twelve employees, one of whom, Liam Fisher, is trying to turn eel innards into a marketable condiment. On the day that I met him, he was carrying a tiny fish-shaped bottle of prototype behind one ear. He produced it like a magic nickel and squeezed an oily drop onto my finger. It tasted like liquid fish. Co-workers were preparing to run dead eels through a butterfly machine. The company, which sells fillets and smoked eel to restaurants and grocery stores, expects to hit a production record of half a million pounds next year.
Rademaker led me through a laboratory, where she and her staff monitor the health of their eels by microscope. “We look at their gills, we look at their skin, we look at their fins,” she said. The company spends two years growing each new class of elvers into processable adults. We stopped in the doorway of a room the size of an airplane hangar, where nearly two million eels were living in dozens of gurgling, futuristic tanks. Another half a million glass eels were quarantined. Rademaker explained, “We keep things super biosecure, because we have one time of year to get them.”
When an elver permit is not renewed, or the licensee dies, a newcomer gets the slot via the state’s lottery. “The lottery’s good,” a fisherman named Randy insisted one night in the patriarch’s garage. Loughran countered, “You have families that have been doing this for fucking generations, and instead of being able to pass on their fucking livelihood they have to put it up for a lottery, for anyone and their brother to take a piece of it.”
“So, yes, then *you* end up like the Rockefellers,” Randy, who was getting red in the face, replied.
“He’s disgusted because he wants a piece of this,” Loughran said.
“I’m fuckin’*pissed*,” Randy said. A lot of Mainers want badly to win the lottery. “It’s an industry, not a fucking cult.”
“Randy, chill.”
“It’s like lobstering,” Randy said. Down East, a commercial lobster license is one of the few paths to a middle-class income. (“It’s not like there’s a lot of accounting jobs around here,” one elverman told me.) Certain lobster permits can be legally transferred, and they often sell for tens of thousands of dollars. Feigenbaum, the exporter who co-owns the company that Sheldon went to work for after prison, and who once served on the A.S.M.F.C., has pushed for transferrable quotas for glass eels. He pitches eelers by asking, Wouldn’t you like to be able to leave something to your grandchildren?
In Canada, quotas are distributed basically evenly among nine companies. Feigenbaum runs one of them; it controls about twenty-six hundred pounds of quota, according to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Some Mainers worry that transfers could lead to a few entities dominating the industry in the U.S., too, and force formerly independent elvermen to work for someone else, for an hourly wage. “If you could buy up quotas in Maine, you’d be sitting back like any other corporation, where only a few people make all the money,” an elverman told me. “It would be horrible for the fishery.” (Feigenbaum told me that such fears are “unwarranted,” and that elver quotas should be transferrable only under certain conditions, mostly related to aquaculture.)
This year’s elver season closed at just over fifteen hundred dollars per pound. The elvermen pulled their nets. The alewives were running now, and the lobster boats were going out, though lobstering, for some, had started to feel like more trouble than it was worth. The warming oceans are pushing lobsters north, and the industry has already collapsed in southern Maine. Last year, the statewide catch fell to ninety-four million pounds, the lowest level since 2009. Fishermen’s prospects are further hampered by efforts to erect windmill farms and to save the planet’s last three hundred and sixty or so North Atlantic right whales, which can get tangled in fishing ropes. In the patriarch’s garage, a sternman named Tristan told me, “Kids growing up now, I’d tell them *not* to try working on the water.” Mainers whose families have been fishing for generations are pushing their children toward contracting, or trucking—toward land.
Several days ago, I called Keene, the fisherwoman from Lubec. Her family has lived in Maine since it was Massachusetts. An ancestor, Richard Warren, came over on the Mayflower, she told me. (“I have my certificate!”) His progeny supposedly also includes Ulysses S. Grant, Sarah Palin, and Taylor Swift. In addition to packing fish, Keene’s forebears founded community newspapers and served in the Coast Guard. Both her grandfather and her father were keepers of the West Quoddy Head Lighthouse, a peppermint-striped tower with a fog bell and a beam visible eighteen miles away, across the Quoddy Narrows.
Keene’s college degree involved computers, but she prefers being outdoors. She has dug clams for a living and picks periwinkles on winter beaches, making sure to leave the smallest ones alone, giving them the “chance to grow up.” She has urged people not to overharvest rockweed, a marine algae that farmers add to their soil. Cherry and apple trees that she planted after the elver windfall haven’t borne much fruit, but that was all right. “We have a nice little garden, and some chickens and stuff,” she told me.
This fall, not long after she picks the last of her cucumbers, Keene will turn sixty-six. It pains her to know that state law prevents her from bequeathing her elver license to her children or grandchildren. It will, in a sense, die with her.
When I first rang Keene, she answered with a bark worthy of Olive Kitteridge: “What do you want?” Like most everyone else Down East, she had zero interest in talking to another reporter about elvers. “You get hit over the head every time you do,” she said. The articles always seemed to dwell on venality and crime. Keene much preferred talking about the sight of a baby seal, or that night when she was out clamming alone and sat on a bucket to smoke a cigarette, and a fox strolled by. She told me, “It’s not just about how much money you can make. It’s about seeing the alewives trying to get upriver, and an eagle fishing for them. And hearing the river at night. When you see millions and millions and millions of elvers, it’s mind-blowing. You see full moons. You see rings around the moon. You see fog. If you see garbage, you pick it up. You want passage for all the things that are trying to get into the lakes to spawn. You want it to be—*not ruined*.”
One night when Keene was about fifteen, she begged to go out on the water with her grandfather, a lifelong fisherman with one eye. They put on warm clothes and crossed Johnson Bay in a skiff, to see how the herring were running in a certain cove. Volume was measured by the hogshead, a cask or a barrel that holds sixty-three gallons.
Keene’s grandfather cut the outboard motor and put a finger to his lips. Using a cloth-wrapped oar, he rowed quietly into the cove. Keene watched, mystified, as he lowered a long piano wire into the water, and waited. “What was *that*?” she recalled asking him on the way home. “He said, ‘I could tell how many hogshead of herring there were by how hard they were hitting the wire.’ I knew I wanted to be a fisherman after that.” ♦
