Maine’s baby eel fishing season ended over the weekend with its lowest catch total in 10 years and — except for the COVID year of 2020 — its lowest catch value since 2010.
But industry officials say that the abundance of elvers is cyclical and this year’s totals — which were influenced by colder weather — do not necessarily suggest any long-term decline in the fishery.
The state has an annual statewide catch limit for baby eels, which also are known as elvers, of roughly 9,500 pounds, but this spring only 7,477 pounds were netted. And the average statewide price of $891 per pound that fishermen earned is the lowest such average they’ve been paid since 2014, when it was $874.
The combination of those two factors means that Maine’s cumulative elver haul over the past 11 weeks netted only $6.6 million. That’s more than the $5 million total in 2020, when Maine fishermen reached the statewide catch limit but global trade plummeted during the start of the COVID pandemic.
But when not including 2020, this year’s is the lowest annual statewide catch value since 2010, when elver fishermen together brought in less than $600,000. From 2015 through 2024 — excluding 2020 — Maine elver fishermen averaged a per-pound price of $1,827 and annual statewide gross earnings of more than $16 million.
“The weather played a big role this spring,” said Darrell Young, a longtime elver fisherman from Waltham and a top official with the Maine Elver Fishermen Association. “The whole month of March, the wind blew from the northwest and kept the eels offshore.”
Young said cold weather delayed the elver run, which spreads north along the East Coast as temperatures rise each spring. But he also said the fishery is cyclical and that catches dip every five years or so, as they did this spring.
“I didn’t start fishing until April 15, it was so cold,” Young said.
Weather conditions eventually became more favorable Down East, he said, which resulted in eastern Maine fishermen catching their quotas while those in midcoast and southern Maine found fewer eels in their nets. Young said he traveled to Washington County to fish, and was able to reach his quota.
He noted that Passamaquoddy Tribe — which has its own quota and does not assign specific catch limits to individual members — does the majority of its fishing in far eastern Maine and reached its tribal limit. Other fishermen, native and otherwise, who set nets in the tidal portion of the Penobscot River in Bangor or further west, did not do as well, he said.
“Bangor just started running,” Young said, referring to elvers that are showing up there in big numbers now. If fishermen were allowed to catch elvers until mid-June, instead of having to stop on June 7, most everyone would have reached their catch limits, he said.
As for the relatively low price, Young said, harvests in east Asia this spring have been bigger than in recent years, reducing demand for eels from Maine.
“They whaled them,” he said. “They did pretty good over there.”
The vast majority of baby eels caught in Maine and eastern Canada are shipped live to China and then grown to adult size in aquaculture ponds to feed east Asia’s voracious appetite for seafood. Due to low numbers of eels in Europe, exports there of eels have been banned since 2010.
