Maine’s most valuable fish on a per-pound basis are returning and being “hunted” with nets in or near streams and rivers, as you see here in the mouth of Patten Stream yesterday.
These fish are baby American eels (Anguilla rostrata) known as elvers or glass eels. (Yes, eels are fish.) At this stage, the eels are transparent except for their eyes and backbone, as you can see from this Leighton Archive image:
The elvers are thought to be migrating here from their parents’ breeding grounds in and around the Sargasso Sea. It’s also thought that the babies are seeking to – somehow – find the freshwater streams and ponds in which their parents matured. But it’s hard to find out what is really happening in eel migrations.
The price of these babies is controlled by market ups and downs. This year, the opening elver price is a reported $1,800 per pound. The high price of more than $2,360 occurred in 2018 and the low was $525 in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic turmoil. They’re sold live to Asian importers who raise them and resell the mature eels for delicacies.
At some time after maturity (usually years), many of these eels will – again, somehow – migrate from here back to their species’ breeding grounds and die there after breeding. Thus, they are “catadromous” fish that have life cycles in fresh and salt waters.
The Maine elver fishing season opened Tuesday, March 22, and will end June 7. Methods for harvesting them are limited to hand-dipping nets and “Fyke” nets (usually pronounced “Fick” nets). As you see above, Fyke nets are large, thin-meshed funnel nets with a trap and capture bag at the end. They’re placed in the historic paths of the incoming eels.
(Images in Surry, Maine, on March 25, 2022, except for noted Leighton Archive image.)