It was 10 years ago this month, when an earthquake and tsunami struck Japan, that the availability of farmed eels in that country plummeted, boosting the price of glass eels in Maine. The annual glass eel fishing season in Maine typically starts in late March and runs to early June. In turn, the value of Maine’s annual harvest for baby or glass eels - also called elvers - has ballooned from a few hundred thousand dollars each year into a multimillion-dollar enterprise. Overfishing of eel species anguilla japonica in East Asia, and of the anguilla anguilla eel species in Europe - and tight fishing restrictions imposed for those species - have increased demand for anguilla rostrata, the American eel found in Maine. The mysterious nature of eels, which are active at night and dormant during the day, has been perplexing for fisheries regulators who aim to protect them from overfishing or habitat degradation caused by dams and pollution. Sigmund Freud, before he became known as the founder of modern psychoanalysis, once famously spent a summer as a student dissecting eels in Trieste, Italy, searching for their reproductive organs - before it was determined that eels don’t develop these organs until late in life, not long before they return to sea to procreate. Nor has anyone ever been able to get eels to reproduce in captivity. The smallest larval eels scientists can find are in the Sargasso Sea, out in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, but no one has ever seen adult eels reproducing.
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