The price of Maine’s baby eels has hit a 16-year low for a statewide average of $286 per pound this month, the lowest such average since global demand made prices for Maine’s eels soar in 2011.
The average price per pound in Maine is roughly $600 lower than last year, when it was $891 per pound, according to data released by the Maine Department of Marine Resources. The average statewide price was $1,238 per pound in 2024 and more than $2,000 in each of the two years before that.
The state’s fishery for baby eels — also known as elvers or glass eels — peaked in 2018 at $2,366 per pound, according to historical data recorded by the department. Maine’s annual elver fishery starts in late March and runs through early June, or until the statewide catch limit of 9,688 pounds is reached.
May’s average elver price is the lowest since 2010, a year before Maine’s elver fishery boomed because of a European ban on exporting eels and a tsunami that devastated eel farms in Japan. By 2011, after both events, Maine’s elvers prices jumped from $185 to $891 per pound, and a year later more than doubled.
The current price drop is largely due to a surge in the global, and specifically Asian, elver supply, which has deflated demand for Maine’s stock, according to a man at an Ellsworth elver buying shop who asked not to be identified.
So far this season, the elver harvest’s total value is at $1.3 million for 4,708 pounds of harvested baby eels.
Last year, when Maine’s elver fishing season concluded with its lowest catch total in 10 years, excluding 2020 when COVID interrupted the market, industry officials said the fishery is cyclical and the season’s low totals were impacted by cold weather, rather than indicative of a long-term decline in the state’s fishery.
The majority of American baby eels caught in Maine waters are shipped live to eastern Asia, where they’re kept in aquaculture ponds until they’re fully grown and then sold for seafood.
State officials implemented strict regulations on the elver fishery in 2014 after interstate regulators imposed an annual statewide catch limit on Maine, which is the only state with a substantial elver fishery.
