Saving Seafood

Grant to Thomaston startup may help keep Maine elvers home

American Unagi wins a $10,000 grant from Gorham Savings.

August 2, 2017 — American Unagi, the Thomaston-based company that aims to grow Maine glass eels to market size and sell them domestically, received a $10,000 grant from Gorham Savings Bank this week as part of the bank’s Emerging Idea Award.

American Unagi was born out of Sara Rademaker’s desire to offer an alternative for this globe-trotting local resource. Glass eels, or elvers as they are better known, are caught in Maine waters and flown to Asia where they are sold to fish farms, grown out to adult length and then, quite often, processed for sushi that returns to the United States via shipping containers.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Baby eel lottery is a go in Maine, where elver fishing pays

July 14, 2017 — AUGUSTA, Maine — Maine is implementing a new lottery system for licenses to fish for baby eels, which are worth more than $1,000 per pound on the worldwide sushi market.

Baby eels, called elvers, are a major fishery in Maine, where fishermen sell them to dealers so they can be sent to Asian aquaculture companies to be raised to maturity and used as food. But industry members and lawmakers have said the fishery needs a way to bring new people into the business because many elver fishermen are nearing retirement and there is no way to get a license.

The Legislature approved a permit lottery system last month. The law will likely be in effect by late October, said Rep. Jeffrey Pierce, a Dresden Republican who serves as a consultant to the elver industry. The law states that the first lottery could be held next year on or before Feb. 15.

“At some point you have to ask: How low do you want your license numbers to go?” Pierce said. “They don’t have to hold a lottery every year, but they do have the ability if they want to.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Sentinel 

Elver season ends

June 8, 2017 — Maine’s elver season ended Wednesday. By most accounts it was successful.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission limited Maine harvesters to a landings quota of 9,616 pounds for this year. According to the Department of Marine Resources, as of 6 p.m. Monday, Maine dealers reported buying 9,281.269 pounds of elvers and paying harvesters a total of $12,088,884 — an average price of $1,303 per pound.

The total quota is allocated among harvesters licensed by the state and the four federally recognized Indian tribes.

As of Monday evening, DMR-licensed harvesters had landed just over 7,315 pounds out of a total quota of 7,566.3 pounds.

Harvesters of the Houlton Band of Maliseet had landed about 87 pounds from their approximately 107-pound quota.

Micmac Nation harvesters landed their entire 38.8-pound quota and Penobscot Nation harvesters had landed all but one pound of their 620-pound quota.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American

MAINE: Elver season opens, but action is slow

March 30, 2017 — ELLSWORTH, Maine — Elver fishing season opened on March 22 but, while Downeast stream banks are blossoming with fyke nets, at least so far, the juvenile eels that can fetch $2,000 per pound or more when the market is hot have been pretty scarce.

“Everyone set their nets to save their spots,” Darrell Young, an elver harvester from Franklin, said Monday morning. “The water’s too cold. I haven’t even started fishing yet.”

According to Young, fishermen with nets in the Union River have been landing only a few eels at a time.

“I spoke to one girl,” Young said. “She had 50 eels in her net.”

That’s not many, considering that it takes about 2,000 elvers to total a pound.

The few elvers that fishermen have been taking haven’t been of very good quality either.

“They’re weak. They don’t want to buy them,” Young said.

Weak or not, the few elvers that have been coming to market are fetching a reasonably good price.

Read the full story at the Mount Desert Islander

Three More Plead Guilty to Elver Trafficking as Part of DOJ’s Multi-State Investigation

December 1, 2016 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Harry Wertan, Jr., Mark Weihe and Jay James each pleaded guilty to selling or transporting elvers in interstate commerce, which they had harvested illegally, or knew had been harvested illegally, in South Carolina.  The offenses in the case are felonies under the Lacey Act, each carrying a maximum penalty of five years’ incarceration, a fine of up to $250,000 or up to twice the gross pecuniary gain or loss, or both.

The pleas were the result of “Operation Broken Glass,” a multi-ohurisdiction U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) investigation into the illegal trafficking of American eels.  To date, the investigation has resulted in guilty pleas for ten individuals whose combined conduct resulted in the illegal trafficking of more than $2.6 million worth of elvers.

“We will not allow the rivers of the United States to be the poaching grounds for international seafood markets,” said Assistant Attorney General Cruden. “The American eel is an important but limited natural and economic resource that must be protected.  Trafficking only undercuts the toil and honest efforts of those who obey the law.”

Elvers are exported for aquaculture in east Asia, where they are raised to adult size and sold for food.  Harvesters and exporters of American eels in the United States can sell elvers to east Asia for more than $2000 per pound.

Because of the threat of overfishing, elver harvesting is prohibited in the United States in all but three states: Maine, South Carolina and Florida.

“Today’s pleas in the illegal trade of American Eels are a tremendous step in preserving this important fishery,” said Colonel Chisolm Frampton for the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, Law Enforcement Division.  “A multitude of state and federal agencies did outstanding work to bring this case to successful conclusion.”

This story originally appeared on Seafoodnews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

MAINE: Eel farmer wants to keep Maine’s wriggly gold close to home

December 1, 2016 — SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine — Sara Rademaker wants to give the East Coast’s most valuable eels a much shorter commute from river to sushi roll.

Baby eels, also called elvers, are at the center of a lucrative business in Maine, which is home to the only large-scale fishing operation for them in the country. Fishermen sold them for more than $2,000 per pound last year, and they typically are sent as seed stock to Asian aquaculture companies so they can be raised to maturity and processed into sushi and other food products.

But Rademaker, a Maine aquaculture farmer, is looking to change all that and keep more of the state’s valuable baby eels closer to home. She’s operating a small eel farming operation in South Bristol, Maine, that raises the elvers so they can be sold live and fully grown to local restaurants.

Rademaker launched American Unagi in 2014 and sold her first eels to Maine sushi restaurants this summer. She is hoping to scale up production in the coming years.

“The local food movement is shifting toward seafood,” she said. “Having products that are produced local, that have traceability, that can show they are sustainable is going to be important.”

Eel aquaculture in America is underdeveloped, as most of the business takes place in Asia and Europe. Rademaker buys her elvers locally from purchasers who acquire them from Maine fishermen, and she is raising her eels at the University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center. She said she expects to sell more than 2,000 pounds of the eels within two years.

Maine is one of only two states with an elver fishery; South Carolina’s fishery is much smaller.

Rademaker has set an ambitious goal. America’s entire wild-caught eel fishery, which is mostly centered around Maryland, only yields between 800,000 and a million pounds of eels per year. Wild-caught older eels, which make up most of the fishery, are worth much less than the baby eels Maine fishermen take from rivers and streams.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Herald & Review

MAINE: State hopes new card system can help revive struggling urchin fishery

September 26, 2016 — State officials are hoping what is good for elvers will be good for urchins, too.

Having implemented an electronic “swipe” card system in the elver fishery in 2014, the Maine Department of Marine Resources now is requiring urchin fishermen and wholesale dealers to use such cards to register every transaction. The requirement, which will give the department up-to-the-minute statewide harvest data, went into effect when the urchin season got underway on Sept. 1.

The goal, according to DMR officials, is to better manage the struggling fishery, which has seen far better times. Just over 20 years ago, Maine’s annual urchin landings briefly exceeded $40 million, noted Patrick Keliher, head of DMR. Only lobstering, which in the mid-1990s first passed the $100 million-a-year mark, was more valuable.

With only $4.3 million in total statewide landings in Maine in 2015, urchins now are the state’s seventh-most lucrative commercially fished species. The vast majority of all the urchins harvested in Maine are shipped to the Far East for the region’s voracious seafood market.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

New Technology Supports Efforts to Restore Maine’s Urchin Fishery

September 1, 2016 — The following was released by the Maine Department of Marine Resources:

September 1, 2016 – While Maine’s 2016-2017 sea urchin season will be a repeat of last season in terms of the number of fishing days and daily landing limits, harvesters and dealers will be equipped with new technology designed to improve future prospects for this fishery.

Maine DMR is launching a new swipe card system for the sea urchin fishery which will create efficiencies for industry and DMR staff, and will support efforts to restore and sustain this fishery, at one time second only to lobster in landed value.

By automating required weekly dealer reports, previously done on paper, “swipe cards reduce the chance of human error which can occur when transcribing landings information,” said Trisha Cheney, DMR Resource Management Coordinator for Sea Urchins.

Similar to the elver fishery, each time urchin harvesters sell their product, they swipe their card in the dealer’s card reader, and the dealer enters the sales information into a computer loaded with customized reporting software.

Each transaction, including the harvester’s information encoded on a magnetic strip on the back of the card, and pounds and price entered by the dealer, will be uploaded from the dealer computer to a secure server accessed by DMR managers.

“My intent in expanding the use of the swipe card system is to ensure the accurate and timely landings information which is crucial to the successful management of Maine’s commercial fisheries,” said Patrick Keliher, Maine Department of Marine Resources Commissioner. “This is especially important in a fishery like this, which was once the second most valuable in Maine.”

Beginning in the 1980s, Maine sea urchin landings began to rise dramatically with the development of a market in Japan. The rising demand prompted increased fishing pressure. By 1995 there were 1,840 licensed harvesters who landed 34.2 million pounds valued at more than $35 million, behind only lobster in value for wild harvested fisheries.

However the increasing pressure on the resource resulted in a prohibition on new licenses, which is still in place. In 2015, Maine’s 305 urchin harvesters landed 1.5 million pounds valued at $4.3 million dollars.

“When managers must rely on insufficient or outdated information, it forces them to be more precautionary in their approach,”   said Cheney. “By providing managers with more timely and accurate data, the new urchin swipe card system will improve our understanding of the fishery, allowing for more targeted measures, which could mean more harvesting opportunity in the future.”

“The DMR has had great success with the swipe card system in the elver fishery. This technology has helped Maine ensure the future of that important fishery,” said Keliher. “We anticipate that the swipe card system will also support efforts to restore and sustain Maine’s urchin fishery.”

Is the eel industry on the slippery slope to extinction?

July 25, 2016 — As we approach the end of July, supermarkets [across Japan] are beginning to stock up on one of the nation’s much-loved summer fish: freshwater eel.

In recent years, however, the cost of eel has risen sharply and consumers are now facing the upcoming Doyo no Ushi no Hi (Day of the Ox, a day dedicated to eel consumption) on July 30 in the knowledge that they’ll be expected to pay through the nose for a slab of the freshwater fish.

Rampant overfishing and the scientific community’s overall lack of knowledge on the biology of eel has left the industry in a crisis. The dwindling domestic eel population has consequently pushed up prices and forced a number of specialist eel restaurants to close. So scarce is the fish in restaurants these days that it’s almost considered to be something of a luxury item.

“I think that the soaring eel prices are truly unfortunate,” says Torami Murakami, chairman of the All Japan Association for Sustainable Eel Aquaculture. “If prices continue to stay at this level, an important part of Japanese food culture will remain out of consumers’ reach.”

Murakami himself enjoys packing away what has become a delicacy, but realizes that increasing prices are making it more difficult for eel to remain on dining tables across the country.

“Eel has been loved in Japan for millennia,” Murakami says. “It’s crucial that we continue this ancient Japanese food culture.”

The eating of freshwater eel — or unagi — is a culinary romance that has lasted more than 5,000 years. Indeed, eel bones have been found in shell mounds dating back to the Jomon Period, which lasted from around 10,000 B.C. to 200 B.C.

Read the full story at the Japan Times

Maine Elver Harvesters Net Third Highest Overall Value in the History of the Fishery

June 8, 2016 — The following was released by the Maine Department of Marine Resources:

With Maine’s 2016 elver season concluding yesterday at noon, the 982 harvesters who fished this season netted $13,388,040, which is the third highest value in the history of the fishery according to preliminary landings data from the Maine Department of Marine Resources.

Maine DMR data indicates that the total was nearly $2 million more than was earned last season by the 920 active harvesters. While the average value this season was $1,435 per pound compared with $2,171 last season, it was the fourth highest on record.

Preliminary landings data indicates that harvesters caught 9,330 pounds of the 9,688 total statewide quota compared with 5,259 pounds harvested last season. According to DMR data, 285 harvesters reached their individual quota in 2016 compared to 104 in 2015.

“Law changes put in place for this season, including the elimination of the weekly 48-hour closure and the extension of the season by a week, have resulted in much better opportunity for Maine’s elver harvesters,” said Marine DMR Commissioner Patrick Keliher.

“Our success using the swipe card and quota systems to manage this fishery gave us the confidence to eliminate those restrictions and provide Maine harvesters a better chance to land their full quota.

“The swipe card and quota systems, which were implemented in 2014, also continue to provide reliable tools to prevent illegal trafficking,” said Commissioner Keliher. “This season there were only 7 violations related to illegal elver possession, which is a dramatic decline from the 219 recorded in 2013 before the new management system was implemented.

“With this innovative approach to management, Maine has proven its ability to strike a balance between protecting the resource and providing opportunity for Maine fishermen.”