ELLSWORTH

Officials with Maine’s Department of Marine Resources do not yet have a preliminary estimate for the landings value of this year’s elver season, but the 2012 figures they have compiled so far indicate that it will be much, much higher than it has ever been.

According to comments made in early August by DMR Commissioner Patrick Keliher to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s eel board, the value of the 2012 sales added up so far by DMR is close to $40 million. At that value, the elver fishery now ranks as the second most valuable in Maine behind the state’s $335 million lobster fishery and ahead of soft-shell clams, herring, shrimp and scallops among others.

That $40 million figure is more than five times higher than the value of the elver fishery last year, when a spike in demand from Asia caused the price to skyrocket. Elver fishermen in Maine ended up earning a cumulative figure of $7.65 million — a record at the time — for the 8,500 pounds of juvenile eels that they caught during the 10- week season in 2011, earning an average price of nearly $900 per pound. The elver fishery was the fourth most valuable commercial fishery in Maine last year.

In 2010, a year before a March 2011 tsunami that wiped out aquaculture ponds and fishing fleets in northern Japan, elver fishermen in Maine earned a cumulative total of $584,851 for the 3,100 pounds of elvers they caught. The average price elver fishermen earned in 2010 was $185 per pound.

This past spring, the season opened with elver fishermen earning more than $2,000 per pound and, by the time the season ended 10 weeks later, roughly $2,600 per pound.

Deirdre Gilbert, DMR’s director of marine policy, said last week that the figure cited to the fisheries commission by Keliher is not a preliminary estimate for the entire 2012 season. The state has collected reports from only about 75 percent of Maine’s licensed elver dealers, she said, and none that DMR has received has been audited yet for accuracy.

Gilbert said Keliher told the fisheries commission board that, feasibly, the value of the 2012 elver fishery could end up being closer to $50 million. Keliher was unavailable for comment.

“It was just a speculation about where we might end up,” Gilbert said of Keliher’s comments.

The context in which Keliher provided commission officials with the fishery’s monetary tally is not a rosy one, however. The multi-state regulatory agency considers the American eel population to be depleted and has indicated it will consider imposing additional fishing restrictions on the species.

Maine and South Carolina are the only two states that allow commercial elver fishing. Elvers, also known as glass eels, are juvenile American eels that migrate each spring from the Atlantic Ocean, along the East Coast and up rivers and streams. Maine’s “yellow” and “silver” eel fisheries target later life stages of the same species, according to Gilbert.

Gilbert said Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission officials assured Keliher and other DMR staff that whatever additional fishing restrictions — which pertain to length of season, number of licenses, and gear limits — the commission places on American eels will not disproportionately affect Maine’s elver fishery.

“They felt more comfortable the (commission’s eel) board would be looking at that species on all stages,” she said.

At the same time, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is considering a petition to list American eels under the federal Endangered Species Act, which could prohibit any harvesting of the eels. If the species winds up being listed, Maine’s elver fishery could be shut down altogether.

In a petition filed in 2010 by the Center for Environmental Science, Advocacy and Reliability, the environmental advocacy group claims there are many reasons for a decline in eel populations, including dams and disease, but habitat loss leads the list. Maine is a key offender, according to the group. It maintains that habitat loss has been the greatest — 91 percent — between Maine and Connecticut.

Last month, the center filed a complaint in federal court in Washington alleging that U.S. Fish & Wildlife has not adhered to mandated deadlines for reviewing its petition and for deciding whether the species should be listed under the act.

In response to an email inquiry, a USFWS spokesperson indicated recently that the agency announced a year ago that the petition “presents substantial information” that warrants a more extensive status review of the species. The subsequent status review is under way, she said. She did not indicate when USFWS expects to complete the review but added it will not be during this federal fiscal year, which comes to a close at the end of this month.

The leap in landings value is believed to have had a tremendous economic impact for individual fishermen. Until last year, most if not all of them considered their earnings from elver fishing to be supplemental income and made most of their living in other fisheries or doing something else entirely.

But this past spring, between DMR and the Passamaquoddy Tribe, 643 elver licenses were issued statewide. If the total landings are worth $40 million and each fishermen caught roughly the same amount, that would mean license holders earned an average of $62,000 each during the 10- week season. However, because the equipment each license holder is allowed to use — a hand-dip net, or one or two large, funnel-shaped fyke nets — varies from license to license, and because of varying levels of experience, the amount of elvers each fishermen landed is believed to vary greatly.

DMR has capped the number of licenses it grants each year at 407.