By Michele Christle
Photos by Nolan Altvater
From our October 2024 issue
One morning this past spring, after commercial elver fishermen had met their quotas and elver buyers had closed up shop for the season, two fyke nets showed up where the Megunticook River empties into Camden Harbor. Maine Marine Patrol officer Callahan Crosby was perplexed. A few weeks earlier, the harbor would have been lined with nets and fishermen, but the penalties for breaking elver-fishing rules are stiff, and even a first-time violation can result in permanent license revocation. Crosby, wondering who would make such a brazen move, got back in his pickup truck and waited for the owner of the nets to appear.
A few hours later, a white Dodge Ram pulled up, with state-issued Wabanaki license plates that read FISHRMN. Flags of Sipayik, the Passamaquoddy reservation near Eastport, flew from the back, and a large, blue-plastic fish box sat in the bed — the kind typically used by elver buyers and dealers authorized to deal with much greater volumes than individual fishermen. Erik Francis, a 28-year-old Passamaquoddy fisherman, exited the truck and ambled down to the riverbank to check the nets. He had just been upstream, where he released four pounds of elvers that were previously stuck in puddles and pools below the river-mouth dam. A haul like that, if taken to market, would fetch at least several thousand dollars.
Every spring, billions of elvers — skinny, translucent, wriggly creatures a few inches long — migrate into freshwater ecosystems, from Greenland to Maine to Haiti, after hatching as larvae in the Sargasso Sea, a massive area around Bermuda defined by circulating currents. Eels play vital roles in aquatic ecosystems, though dams have impeded their migrations and significantly reduced their populations. Elvers can climb — during the height of their spring migration, they create squiggly highways at the edges of dams, collectively writhing to make their way over dams — but many won’t make it. Fish passages can help, but not all dams have eel-friendly passages, and the Montgomery Dam, at Camden Harbor, is among many that have nothing.
The elvers Francis scooped up earlier had been deposited during unusually high tides. Work being done on the dam gate had redirected the flow of the river, leaving the elvers stranded. For weeks, Camden select-board member Alison McKellar had been documenting the elvers’ plight. She even received special permission from the Department of Marine Resources to pick up the dying elvers — normally forbidden outside of fishing season, and always to anyone without a license — but only to dump them right back into the harbor below the dam, where they still faced long odds of reaching the river.
Worth about $20 million annually, the elver fishery is the second most valuable in Maine, behind lobster, and it’s by far the most lucrative by weight, with elvers fetching north of $2,000 per pound some years. Factoring in, too, a history of poaching, the Department of Marine Resources is wary of bending regulations around elver handling even a little. One conservation option is known as “trap and truck”: simply driving hauls of elvers around dams. Maine regulators have never sanctioned that approach, even though it has a good track record in places as disparate as Ireland, New Zealand, and Pennsylvania. That’s what prompted the Passamaquoddy to step in.
Earlier this year, Amkuwiposohehs “Pos” Bassett, chief of the Passamaquoddy Tribe at Sipayik, and the tribal council decided to start a new conservation initiative, issuing licenses to three tribal fishermen, including Erik Francis, to catch, weigh, and move bunches of elvers from below to above dams throughout the spring. This fall, they plan to repeat the process but in the opposite direction, trapping mature eels on the downstream journey and releasing them below dams, especially those with turbines, which chop eels to bits.
The original aim for the Passamaquoddy’s spring elver conservation was 100 pounds. Francis, though, single-handedly surpassed that target. Over the course of one month, he traveled more than a thousand miles along the coast and moved 230 pounds of elvers. The other two Passamaquoddy fishermen moved an additional 15 pounds. One pound contains between 2,000 and 4,000 elvers, which means the effort likely helped more than half a million eels.
Erik Francis tends to a fyke net during the Passamaquoddy’s new conservation fishing season.
During the commercial elver season, Francis had spent five days away from home — a modest raised ranch at Sipayik, overlooking Passamaquoddy Bay, where he lives with his fiancée and their four-year-old son — to catch several pounds, earning about $4,000 (prices were lower than usual this year). During the conservation season, he was away for the better part of a month, sleeping in his truck, “loving every minute of it,” he says, even though the stipend provided by the tribal government didn’t cover all his expenses. “It’s something I’m passionate about.”
“So what’s the plan?” Crosby, the patrol officer, asked Francis that morning in Camden, crouching atop the seawall, his belt weighted with a tape measure, a firearm, and other tools of the trade. Historically, the state and the Passamaquoddy have clashed over commercial elver fishing, tribal members bridling at limitations on a practice they see as an inherent right. Summonses were issued, gear confiscated. In 2015, Passamaquoddy and Penobscot representatives withdrew from the legislature as tensions came to a head.
But conservation fishing is uncharted terrain. Crosby had heard about the new effort but was one of the first officers to see it in action. Francis chatted for a while with him about how he was relocating elvers at sites up and down the coast, always keeping them in their river of origin. The interaction was brief and amicable. After Crosby made his way back up to his truck to continue his daily patrol, Francis stepped up onto the rocks, folded his arms across his chest, and took in the view. “I have no worries,” he said. “I know what I’m doing, so I’m just gonna keep doing it. It’s a beautiful day on the river.”
The American eel has existed for over two million years and has long been sacred to Wabanaki tribes. The eel is the totem of the Neptune clan, an influential Wabanaki family with members in the Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, and Maliseet tribes. The Passamaquoddy have an eel dance. And the first solid food Mi’kmaqs would give babies was baked eel.
Native people taught early European settlers to catch and prepare eels, which became crucial to settlers’ survival. But colonial land grabs and industrial degradation gradually cut off the Wabanaki from their traditional foodways. Maine fishermen didn’t start targeting the baby eels until the 1970s. In the ’80s, a prolonged lull in international demand halted the fledgling fishery, which only started up again in the early ’90s. Landings reached their historical peak in 2012, thanks to supply shortfalls elsewhere around the world — the European Union had recently banned the export of endangered European eels, and the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant decimated the stock of Japanese eels. Elver prices surged from $185 per pound in 2010 to $1,869 just two years later. Commercial fishing for silver eels, as mature eels are known, has been illegal in Maine since 2014, when regulators determined populations to have dwindled to a critically low point, but fishing for elvers has continued apace.
Today, Maine is the only U.S. state with a significant elver fishery. Elvers harvested here are usually shipped to Asia, where they’re raised to maturity in aquaculture facilities (eels don’t reproduce in captivity) and eventually sold to restaurants. To combat a black market for elvers that developed during the boom years, state officials instituted a quota system, issued swipe cards (more recently, scannable tokens) to fishermen to track their transactions with buyers, prohibited buyers from paying cash, and implemented higher fines for harvesting violations and greater oversight of exporting.
The relationship between the state and the Wabanaki is often fraught — unlike other federally recognized tribes, the tribes in Maine are treated more like municipalities than as nations within the nation, owing to terms of the 1980 Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act. When Chief Bassett started fishing for elvers, in 2012, management of the fishery had exacerbated tensions. Bassett was the head of the Sipayik police then, and he refused to enforce fishing rules against tribal members, instead opting to quit his post. Now, he points to a 2022 study by the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development showing that Wabanaki per capita incomes, which have lagged behind the statewide average by as much as 60 percent in recent years, made a considerable jump right around 2012. He says the lucrative elver market drove the growth, adding, “It brings a lot of much-needed resources for the community.”
In 2018, Bassett was elected to the tribal council, and in 2023, he became chief. For years, he and other Passamaquoddy leaders had kicked around the idea of a trap-and-truck program, and, in his new leadership role, he decided to make the idea a reality. State fishing regulations don’t leave room for conservation-specific elver licenses, and commercial licenses can only be used during a narrow window from late May to early June. So the tribe employed a novel interpretation of Maine law, issuing ceremonial licenses, which, according to statute, permit tribal members to “at any time take, possess, transport, and distribute . . . any marine organism for noncommercial use in a tribal ceremony within the State.” Bassett informed Department of Marine Resources commissioner Patrick Keliher about his plans, and Keliher ultimately supported the idea. “The resource is the bottom line,” a sign hanging in his office declares.
Adam Newell, one of the three Passamaquoddy tribal members licensed to transport elvers around dams last spring, is also a lobsterman. He named his boat Treaty Defender.
At present, state elver-fishing licenses are capped at 425. In 2024, more than 4,500 people entered the lottery for a chance of winning one of 16 available licenses. The statewide quota for elvers, determined by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, is 9,688 pounds, apportioned between the state and the tribes. The Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Mi’kmaq, and Maliseet all have their own rules for managing their share of the quota, but to participate in the fishery, they sign a memorandum of understanding every year acknowledging state rules, or else they won’t receive the scannable tokens required to do business with buyers.
The Passamaquoddy manage their elver quota through a derby-style fishery, issuing 500 to 600 licenses a year. Each license holder is allowed up to five pounds. Once the tribe’s quota of a little less than 1,300 pounds is met, everyone has to take out their nets until the next year, regardless of whether they’ve hit their personal share of the quota. Adam Newell, one of the three Passamaquoddy men given a ceremonial license for the conservation effort, also serves as a member of Sipayik’s tribal council. He thinks that fishermen and regulators, both Wabanaki and non-Wabanaki, need to remember what made the eel such an abundant resource for millennia. “We knew not to overtake,” he says. “We knew when to stop. We knew when that balance was there. If we were over the edge on the balance, we wouldn’t eat that fish for a while. We need to get back to that.”
The issue of how the American eel is actually doing continues to vex fishermen, buyers, conservationists, policymakers, and scientists. With such a large native range and a remote open-ocean breeding ground, the American eel is a difficult species to get a representative pulse on. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, though, maintains that the population is depleted. In 2014, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a Switzerland-based consortium of governmental and nongovernmental organizations, listed the American eel as endangered, although the group’s determinations don’t guide federal or state policy. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has twice received proposals to list American eels as endangered but declined to do so. Former Maine state eel biologist Gail Wippelhauser says that doesn’t necessarily mean the eels aren’t endangered, but rather, sufficient information to substantiate the claim doesn’t exist.
Still, among people interested in eels — whether for ecological, cultural, or commercial reasons — general consensus exists on a pair of points: they all want the American eel’s population to be healthy, and dams pose a major threat to that goal. Whereas fishing impacts a capped number of elvers migrating upstream, a dam impacts every eel traveling up or down that river. And the consequences are not just a matter of mortality but also fertility. Eels don’t develop reproductive organs until later in life, and research indicates that those that make it farther upstream are more likely to become female. A single adult female can lay up to 20 million eggs.
Darrell Young, president of the Maine Elver Fishermen Association, has asked the Maine Department of Marine Resources and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission about moving elvers around dams for years, the same idea the Passamaquoddy started acting on this year. “You guys just want to pick on the fishermen,” Young says, referring to state and interstate regulators. “You don’t want to go where the problem is. The problem is those dam owners. Dams kill more eels than any of us. I’ve had fishermen say, ‘I’ll do it for nothing. Catch a bunch, put them over.’ They won’t allow it.”
The Maine Department of Marine Resources presently runs one life-cycle study on eels, at the Boothbay peninsula’s West Harbor Pond. The study — which essentially amounts to an annual, localized eel census, using various means of catching them suited to different stages of maturation — was required by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission as a condition of keeping the fishery open. Keliher, the Department of Marine Resources commissioner, allows that elvers represent a “data-poor fishery,” and he says expanding life-cycle studies to other rivers in Maine is under consideration. “If we can collect more data in cooperation with the tribes, in cooperation with nonprofits, expanding on citizen science and collecting meaningful data, I’m all in,” he says.
Still, at least for now, the Passamaquoddy efforts are the best option, according to Jim McCleave, a University of Maine professor emeritus of marine sciences, who has traveled many times to the American eel’s Sargasso Sea spawning grounds. “The state could take three years just to develop a plan,” he says. And whether conservation work is done for the sake of helping the fishery or for the sake of restoring ecosystems is largely irrelevant, as the means to both ends are the same. Jason Bartlett, the state biologist who runs the West Harbor Pond study, says, “We’ve hurt them for so long. Any help is good.”
Upon hearing about Passamaquoddy fishermen hauling eels around dams outside of the commercial season, some non-tribal fishermen wrongly assumed the work was funded by the state and felt frustrated that they couldn’t be involved in the work themselves. The Department of Marine Resources fielded a number of calls from people in the elver fishery, wondering about the initiative and the authority to conduct it.
Not everyone seemed satisfied. “Elver conservation?” one buyer said to me. “You mean code for more quota?” Still, everyone I spoke with across the industry wanted to see more done to save eels, not less. Many expressed disappointment that more elver conservation hasn’t been undertaken to date, under any authority, state or tribal.
One person I spoke to who doesn’t participate in the fishery is Alivia Moore, a member of the Penobscot Nation. Moore cofounded Niweskok, a collaboration of Wabanaki food and medicine providers that has, among other initiatives, worked to restore tribal access to traditional wild foods, such as rice, berries, and shellfish, through relationships with land trusts, managers of public lands, and private landowners. What Passamaquoddy conservation fishermen are doing, Moore thinks, taps into something fundamental: “It’s not our individual authority — it’s the earth’s authority. What we’re seeing with these fisheries reignites a practice and an embodiment of our responsibility to the eels and the ecosystems that they’re a part of nourishing, the health of the river, and the oceans. I’m not an elver fisher. I don’t have an investment in the commercial part of those fisheries at all. But it’s really igniting that deeper responsibility that we, as Wabanaki people, have.”
