Elver reaction

At 2,500 individuals to the pound, the spaghetti-thin, inches-long elver is the smallest of Maine’s commercial marine species. Even at an eye-popping $200 per pound, the total value of the landings last year was barely good enough to crack the state’s top 20.

Overall, a bit player in commercial fisheries. Yet, as the 11 bills the Marine Resources Committee will begin hearing today suggest, the elver — or glass eel, or juvenile American eel — is, pound for pound, the biggest troublemaker in the business.

The springtime elver harvest is, as anyone knows who’s noticed the fyke nets strung one after another along the banks of a Maine river or seen the hand-dippers jockeying for position, the latest gold rush fishery. The resurgence of a dormant Asian market a few years ago and prices as high as as $350 per pound, took Maine by surprise and the state is just now catching its breath.

Maine isn’t the only state to have this fishery develop with the ability to measure and control its impact up the marine environment. It is, however, one of only two not to over-react. Two years ago, five Atlantic coast states had an elver harvest — Connecticut, Florida, New Jersey, South Carolina and Maine. This year, it’s down to South Carolina and Maine.

There certainly are legitimate concerns about the elver harvest. It has been heavy and it comes at a time when scientists are concerned about an overall population decline in the Atlantic from disease, climate change, habitat degradation and predation. But as events in the three states that banned the harvest suggest, sociology — perhaps even snobbery — is as strong a force as biology.

New Jersey is the most recent and particularly blatant example of a harvest banned not so much because of elvers but elver harvesters. A bill to re-establish the elver fishery seemed sure of approval last fall; New Jersey is not unlike Maine in having a strong sense of its commercial fishing tradition and an even stronger understanding that a key to survival in today’s commercial fishing environment is the expansion into underutilized species and new markets.

Opponents of the elver harvest didn’t make much of a dent with their scientific arguments. The tide turned when New Jersey lawmakers began to hear subtle messages that working-class harvesters really didn’t belong along the rather upscale riverbanks. The occasional arguments and shoving matches between competing harvesters were portrayed as riots. The whisper campaign worked — the state senate defeated in late December by a nearly unanimous vote.

Maine lawmakers are under similar pressure. Some of the bills, those that would prohibit harvesting on specific portions of certain rivers for no apparent scientific basis, seem driven by social factors, spot zoning of the worst kind. One, to close the fishery immediately, would cause unnecessary and unreasonable hardship to a group of people who already are having a hard enough time getting by.

Two, submitted by the Department of Marine Resources, best balance economic reality and access to public resources with the legitimate concerns of environmental impact. The first, L.D. 905, shortens an already short season to just two months, thus allowing more migrating elvers to make it upstream, and adds some modest restrictions regarding licensing and the placement of fixed fyke nets.

LD 906 is strong medicine. It caps the number of licenses and gradually eliminates fixed nets and traps; by 2003, elver fishing will be done solely by hand-operated dip nets, reducing the take of unintended species.

These two bills address concerns about the elver fishery in a rational way, and they avoid the panic attacks seen elsewhere. Just as importantly, they focus the Marine Resources Committee’s attention on marine resource issues — species conservation, reducing bycatch, stock assessment, access — and leave the sociology to the sociologists.