Elver alarm

The current crisis in Maine’s elver fishery is partly about science, partly about sociology and, ultimately, hardly a crisis at all.

Yes, the number of nets — nearly 3,800 — trapping the transparent, finger-length baby eels as they swim upstream is nearly twice that of last year, and, yes, the Legislature’s decision last year to cut the cost of entering this fishery — permits for five fyke nets dropped from $1,000 to $650 — might now look like a truly nutty move.

Those who digest events in one-year dollops are alarmed. This drastic increase in fishing pressure surely will wipe out the resource. Eagles, salmon and other appealing creatures that prey upon these lowly morsels will starve. The entire food chain is imperiled.

Others know better. They know that the Legislature drastically increased license costs in 1996, which led to a substantial drop in licenses last year and loud objections that the very Mainers most in need of additional sources of income had been priced out of business. They also know that license fees today still are higher than they were than they were before 1996. This year’s spike cannot be blamed on a fire sale of fishing permits.

There are several reasons for the increased activity, but the prime suspect is poverty. Those who survive seasonally by chopping, tipping and raking are not prospering. When the Asian market for Maine elvers, dormant for more than a decade, revived a few years ago, these folks had little choice but to add dipping to their repertoire. At $100 to $350 a pound, this sounds like easy money, but there are a whole lot of elvers to the pound. It’s a lucky harvester who gets more than $10 an hour for the hard work of being on the job at every high tide, in every kind of weather.

The elver season runs fom March 15 to June 15. Elvers begin their upstream run shortly before the opening and long after the closing — well into the summer and even tapering off through the fall. The middle third of a stream must be kept clear of nets. The weekly schedule of four days open and three closed recently was reversed by the Department of Marine Resources to three on and four off. Maine is hardly being picked clean of elvers.

There are several ideas DMR intends to propose to the Legislature next year to further ensure that does not happen. Since the early season elvers tend to be weak and often don’t survive the trip to market, delaying the opening until early April makes sense. A rolling closure up the coast could equalize the harvest geographically. Restricting fyke nets to one bank and the less effective dip nets to the other could create a larger passageway for the elvers. Concerns about bycatch of salmon and other migrating species have been lessened with the requirement this year that fyke nets contain exclusion panels. Additional gear improvements are in the works.

Few want to say it out loud, but the current cry for an emergency closure to curtail the harvest is, to a considerable degree, driven by concerns that have nothing to do with fish. The heaviest elver harvest is in those southern and midcoast Maine locations where streams meet the sea. This tends to be rather precious real estate — often the center of a quaint village, perhaps not too far from the yacht club — a place where those who struggle for a living aren’t usually seen. That a few elver harvesters have been known to squabble, fight and cause a bit of trouble is a concern of local law enforcement, not of natural resource managers. That some who would prefer not to see how the other half works would put them out of work should concern everyone.