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One Of Earth's Biggest Freshwater Fish Is Bouncing Back, A Rare 'win Win'

The 10-foot-long arapaima was quickly disappearing in Brazil until local communities stepped in to save it—and themselves.

A close-up view of an arapaima from the Brazilian Amazon shows its unique scales, which are one of the toughest materials in nature.

ByStefan Lovgren

Photographs byAndre Dib

June 14, 2024

Giant freshwater fish are among the most endangered animals on Earth. But in the lush waterways of the Amazon, one leviathan is swimming against the current.

Meet the arapaima, a fish capable of growing up to 10 feet long and weighing up to 500 pounds. Just over a decade ago, this popular seafood species faced extinction, its numbers ravaged by overfishing. But conservation efforts spearheaded by local communities have turned things around for the arapaima, with populations increasing dramatically across the Amazon. (Read about efforts to save the world's biggest freshwater fish.)

A fisherman catches an arapaima within the Lago Serrado community in the state of Amazonas, Brazil, in 2022.

Photograph by Andre Dib

In areas where communities have adopted sustainable fishing practices, arapaima numbers increased 425 percent in 11 years, according to research by João Campos-Silva, a Brazilian ecologist and National Geographic Explorer. He is part of the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Amazon Expedition—a two-year scientific exploration of the river basin. The number has since grown to 600 percent, though those results have not yet been published, he says.

To date, Campos-Silva has worked with around 40 communities along the Juruá River, a major Amazon tributary that traverses mostly pristine rainforest in western Brazil. Overall in the Amazon, around 1,100 communities have adopted conservation initiatives for the fish, which are listed as data deficient by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The arapaima's resurgence is a conservation triumph that can serve as a blueprint for safeguarding other large aquatic species in the Amazon and globally, he says. And it highlights the crucial role of local communities in leading successful conservation endeavors.

"For many, many decades, people have been looking to the outside for solutions to the problems in the Amazon, but the arapaima story shows that the answers are often in the hands of the local people and communities living in the forest," says Campos-Silva.

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Roughly the size of the contiguous United States, South America's Amazon Basin, 60 percent of which lies within Brazil's borders, is home to tens of millions of people, including around 400 Indigenous groups. The basin is crisscrossed by thousands of rivers with more fish species than in any other river system on Earth.

Fishermen in the Lago Serrado community set out at sunrise to catch arapaima. Around 1,100 communities in the Amazon have adopted arapaima conservation initiatives.

Photograph by Andre Dib

The largest scaled freshwater fish in the world, the arapaima in Brazil is known as the "pirarucu," a word in the aboriginal Tupí language that translates to "red fish," after its reddish tail. Prowling the region's lakes and swamps, the predatory arapaima is an air breather that can only stay submerged for 10 to 20 minutes before resurfacing to breathe using a specialized, lung-like swim bladder.

This surfacing behavior makes arapaimas easy to catch. A 2014 study found their demand as seafood led to severe overfishing that depleted populations in three out of four of the fishing communities surveyed; the fish completely disappeared from a fifth.

In the areas where communities have implemented conservation programs (pictured, fishers in Lago Serrado), arapaima numbers increased 425 percent in 11 years.

Photograph by Andre Dib

By then, Brazil's government had set up an extensive network of protected areas throughout the Amazon, with several states banning arapaima fishing. To better manage the species, scientists also developed a method to count arapaimas in their lake habitats, drawing inspiration from techniques used to survey breaching whales in the ocean.

The individuals most skilled at counting the fish were those who know them best: fishermen.

"In the split second that an arapaima comes to the surface, an experienced fisherman can tell you the size, weight, and direction of its movement," says Leandro Castello, a tropical ecologist at Virginia Tech's Global Change Center who developed the arapaima-counting model.

Conservation success

About 15 years ago, Campos-Silva, who initially worked on birds before turning his attention to Amazonian biodiversity, began working along the Juruá River, collaborating closely with the residents of the tight-knit São Raimundo community. He also supported the efforts of a local group called the Association of Rural Producers of Carauari to manage arapaima protected areas.

Staff at the Carauari Fish Processing Center process sustainably caught arapaimas in Amazonas, Brazil, in 2022.

Photograph by Andre Dib

The São Raimundo community integrated their traditional knowledge with scientific methodologies, effectively making the conservation efforts their own, he says. "They had seen the decline in their fisheries and were eager to find solutions to improve the situation," he says. (Read more about how scientists are saving megafishes.)

Based on fish counts, the community established a sustainable catch quota, with the federal government permitting an arapaima harvest of up to 30 percent of adults in protected areas. Fish under five feet long could not be harvested. 

Most arapaimas spawn just after seasonal floodwaters rise and spread into the forest. When waters recede during the dry season, the fish are confined to isolated lakes and river channels. It's during this time that fishing operations are allowed.

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The actions produced almost immediate results: Arapaima numbers, boosted by the species' exceptionally rapid growth rate, swiftly recovered.

An aerial view shows floodplain vegetation in Amazonas. During the dry season, arapaimas are confined to isolated lakes and river channels where they breed and lay eggs dug in the muddy bottoms.

Photograph by Andre Dib

As other Juruá River communities adopted the strategy, Campos-Silva was stunned by the economic and social benefits it yielded for local people. In addition to households making more money, improved fishing earnings were reinvested in local schools, health centers, and basic infrastructure. "People realized that through conservation, they can have a better life," he says.

The community-driven initiatives have also enhanced the status of women, who, despite constituting nearly half of the global fisheries workforce, frequently go unacknowledged and unpaid. Women in the Brazilian Amazon are increasingly taking on roles aboard boats and participating more actively in decision-making processes, research shows.

"Our research shows that women are now for the first time earning their own money from Amazonian fishing, which is helping to eradicate general poverty," says Campos-Silva.

In 2018, Campos-Silva founded Instituto Juruá, a Manaus-based nonprofit promoting biodiversity conservation and improved quality of life for local communities. He has since expanded his work to other parts of the Brazilian Amazon as well as the Ucayali River in Peru, another major tributary of the Amazon River with a large Indigenous population.

He and other scientists continue to gain deeper insights into the movement, ecology, and population dynamics of the arapaima, including through tagging and radio-tracking fish. For instance, they've found that for a population of arapaima to be deemed healthy, there should be a minimum of 30 individual fish per square kilometer of floodplain.

Arapaima in Guyana

The community-based conservation approach has yielded even more spectacular results in Guyana, with arapaima populations there increasing tenfold since the turn of the millennium, says Donald Stewart, a fisheries professor at State University of New York.

Yet there are still many unmanaged areas of the Amazon where arapaimas may be going locally extinct. "Vast areas still don't have rigorous population counts or local engagement to protect the fishes from outsiders," he says.

Stewart believes the arapaima could be the largest freshwater fish on Earth. Studying growth ring deposition on the scales of arapaimas living in Guyana's Essequibo River have shown those animals may grow much heavier than those from central Brazil, Stewart says. His research has shown there are several more distinct species of arapaimas, and some could still be considered critically endangered. (Read about a new arapaima species announced in 2016.)

Unmanaged movements of arapaima around Brazil could lead to disease transfer and genetic mixing among these potentially distinct populations, issues that remain largely unstudied.

For Zeb Hogan, a biology professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a National Geographic Explorer, the arapaima conservation success can be a model for protecting and managing populations of other endangered giant fish around the world.

"These results buck an otherwise gloomy trend of severe decline of most species of aquatic megafauna," he says. "It's a rare example of a win-win solution that can be replicated in many areas worldwide."

This article was supported by Rolex, which is partnering with the National Geographic Society on science-based expeditions to explore, study, and document change in the planet's unique regions.

Look for more reports from our Amazon expedition in coming months, including a special issue this fall. We'll also launch an immersive digital experience at natgeo.Com in September, and a documentary will premiere October 10 on National Geographic and stream on Disney+ and Hulu.

Inside The Slimy, Smelly, Secretive World Of Glass-Eel Fishing

The Sargasso Sea, a warm, calm expanse of the North Atlantic Ocean, is bordered not by land but by four strong currents—a gyre. Vast mats of prickly brown seaweed float so thickly on the windless surface that Christopher Columbus worried about his ships getting stuck. The biodiverse sanctuary within and beneath the sargassum produces Anguilla rostrata, the American eel. Each female lays some eight million eggs. The eggs hatch as ribbonlike larvae that drift to the Gulf Stream, which carries them to the continental shelf. By the time they reach Maine, the larvae have transformed into swimmers about the length of an index finger, with the circumference of a bean sprout and the translucence of a jellyfish. Hence their nickname, glass eels, also known as elvers. The glass eel is barely visible, but for a dark stripe—its developing backbone—and a couple of chia seeds for eyes. "Ghosts on the water," a Maine fisherman once called them. Travelling almost as one, like a swarm or a murmuration, glass eels enter tidal rivers and push upstream, pursuing the scent of freshwater until, ideally, they reach a pond and commence a long, tranquil life of bottom-feeding. Elvers mature into adults two to three feet in length, with the girth and the coloring of a slimy bicycle tire. Then, one distant autumn, on some unknown cue, they return to the Sargasso, where they spawn and die.

Maine has thirty-five hundred miles of coastline, including coves, inlets, and bays, plus hundreds of tidal rivers, thousands of streams, and what has been described as "an ungodly amount of brooks." Hundreds of millions of glass eels arrive each spring, as the waters warm. Four hundred and twenty-five licensed elvermen are allowed to harvest slightly more than seven thousand five hundred pounds of them during a strictly regulated fishing season, which runs from late March to early June. Four Native American tribes may legally fish another two thousand or so pounds, with more than half of that amount designated for the Passamaquoddy, who have lived in Maine and eastern Canada for some twelve thousand years. Maine is the only state with a major elver fishery. South Carolina has a small one (ten licensed elvermen), but everywhere else, in an effort to preserve the species, elver fishing is a federal crime.

The elvermen sell their catch to state-licensed buyers, who in turn sell to customers in Asia. The baby eels are shipped live, mostly to Hong Kong, in clear plastic bags of water and pure oxygen, like a sophisticated twist on pet-store goldfish. They live in carefully tended tanks and ponds at aquaculture farms until they are big enough to be eaten. Japan alone annually consumes at least a hundred thousand tons of freshwater eel, unagi, which is widely enjoyed kabayaki style—butterflied, marinated, and grilled.

The American eel became a valuable commodity as overfishing, poaching, and other forms of human interference led to the decline of similar species in Japan (Anguilla japonica) and Europe (Anguilla anguilla). Those species are now red-listed as, respectively, endangered and critically endangered. The U.S. Has not declared the American eel endangered, and fishermen want to keep it that way.

In March, 2011, just before elver season started in Maine, a tsunami in Japan decimated aquaculture ponds, driving the price of American glass eels from about two hundred dollars per pound to nearly nine hundred by the season's closing day. The next year, the price reached one thousand eight hundred and sixty-nine dollars per pound, and soon topped two thousand. National Fisherman calls glass eels "likely the most valuable fish in the United States on a per-pound basis." A recent issue of Marine Policy cited "unprecedented demand" for American eel. Only lobster outranks it in Maine.

During a favorable market and a hard elver run, a Mainer may earn a hundred thousand dollars in a single haul. Each license holder is assigned a quota, ranging from four pounds to more than a hundred, based partly on seniority. Even the lowest quota insures a payout of six thousand dollars if the price per pound breaches fifteen hundred, which happens with some regularity. Maine is the only place in the country where a kid can become eligible for an elver license at fifteen and win a shot at making more money overnight, swinging a net, than slinging years' worth of burgers. Elvermen have sent their children to college on eels, and have used the income to improve their homes, their businesses, their boobs. This year, more than forty-five hundred Mainers applied for sixteen available licenses.

One frosty evening in April, an elverman named Sam Glass turned onto a dead-end road in the state's northernmost coastal region, Down East, and parked beside a stream. The water was about thirty feet wide, with boulders across it and trees on the other side. The stream feeds West Bay, which leads to the Atlantic, whose tide swells and then shrinks the river's volume every twelve hours. Glass, a tall, reserved fifty-year-old with dark, curly hair and a trim beard, pulled five hand-chopped maple poles from the bed of his pickup truck and carried them down the riverbank. Next, he fetched a plastic bucket, nylon cord, coils of rope, two boat anchors, and a fyke net. Unfurled, the net, made of pale, fine-gauge mesh, resembled a Chinese lantern trailed by two oversized streamers, or a mutant sea creature with a barrel-shaped head.

Cartoon by Carolita Johnson

Glass, wearing waders, sloshed into the water and fastened a rope around a boulder, securing the barrel, called the tail bag, at the foot of a gentle rapids. Back on land, he hooked a streamer to one of the maple poles, which he'd stabbed into the earth as a stanchion. The streamer now resembled a wing, hemmed at the top with tubular buoys and weighted at the bottom with chains and one of the boat anchors. To pull the wing taut, Glass roped it to a spruce, then went to work on the other streamer. The net took shape as an ocean-facing funnel, hugging the shore.

The high-tide line showed on the riverbank like a shadow on a wall. In about six hours, the water would rise again, submerging the tail bag and the bottom half of the wings. Glass was working to beat the setting sun and to harness the pull of the moon. If he had set a good net, baby eels would swim right into his trap.

Elvers avoid strong currents by keeping to the sides of rivers, the way mice follow baseboards. Glass long ago learned to look for "pinch points," where the eels are likely to pass within two feet of shore. For the better part of two hours, he cut cord, tied clove hitches, positioned the anchors, tweaked the lean of the stanchions. Hawks and bald eagles were circling, and watching from tree branches. He finished after sundown, his exhalations visible in the beam of his headlamp. "That's about it," he said, and walked back up the riverbank, through the bulrush and thorn. A block of dislodged snow slipped downstream, pinballing through the boulders and passing beneath a bridge, beyond which other elvermen had just finished setting their nets. Glass went home to wait for high water.

Glass grew up in a cedar-shingled house on ten acres near Dyer Bay, and still lives there today. He keeps fyke nets strung up near his apple trees and piled in a greenhouse, where he's been restoring his late father's lobster boat. He got burned out on lobstering a while ago and fantasizes about piloting the boat to the Bahamas. He prefers eeling to lobstering, and travelling to almost anything.

A couple of years ago, Glass and another elverman, Ryan Loughran, went into business together as licensed elver buyers. They partnered with a Korean businessman who wanted to stake a local broker and guarantee a shippable supply. Loughran and Glass augmented their own fishing by taking a commission on each transaction. When I asked why not sell directly to Hong Kong, bypassing the middlemen, another fisherman who overheard the question said, "It isn't done."

Glass has other entrepreneurial interests, including turning a cottage that he built when he was twenty into an Airbnb property. Aside from a shipyard pension, eeling constitutes Loughran's entire livelihood. He is a gregarious father of three in his forties who always wears a baseball cap and, because of a nerve disorder, walks with a cane. When he was a boy, his father, an eeler, advised him to get a fishing license in case glass eels ever became valuable, never expecting a disaster on the other side of the world to produce Florida-condo money, comfortable-retirement money. In the early boom days of eeling, armed buyers roamed the coast with aerated tanks and a tantalizing amount of bundled cash, paying for elvers straight out of the water.

The Maine Department of Marine Resources now required fishermen to sell their catch at a fixed address. Glass's home wasn't particularly conducive to handling customers, so he reached out to the patriarch of a respected fishing family who lived in a more convenient location, with a wide gravel driveway and a stand-alone garage. Glass had known the patriarch's wife since grade school. The patriarch captained a range of vessels and wore jackets embroidered with the name of his forty-two-foot Duffy. "I scallop, I lobster, I eel," he told me one night. I wondered what happens when two competing boats show up at the same fishing grounds—who wins? The patriarch said, "Whoever's got the biggest balls and the biggest red knife." A lobsterman standing next to him nodded solemnly.

The patriarch agreed to rent Glass and Loughran his garage as a buying station. (His name isn't mentioned here because he wouldn't allow it, but he tolerated my hanging around.) This year, in late March, they brought in tanks, aerators, nets, buckets, folding tables, and a portable scale. In one corner, near a "TRUMP 2020" banner, they installed a chest-high tank, which resembled a one-person hot tub. Someone chalked "$900" on a blackboard.

Demand in Asia drives the price, but the floor is set locally by a small group of buyers whose names are known and whose conversations, I was told, are private. Nine hundred dollars per pound was the lowest opening price in years. (Loughran had heard that there was a "bottleneck" in Hong Kong.) As the season progresses, the price climbs in twenty-five- or fifty-dollar increments. Each change is posted in Elverholics, a popular fishing forum on Facebook. Some fishermen sell early and low, just to get money in hand. Those who won't even consider taking less than fifteen hundred dollars a pound respond with yawn emojis and exhortations to "HOOOLLLDDDD!!!!" as they wait for the price-setters to turn on one another.

In early spring, there's little for fishermen in Maine to do other than catch bait herring and prepare boats and drags. The clam flats are still thawing. Eeling, theoretically, bridges the gap between seasons. Glass eels hate turbulence, and cold water stupefies them. They seem to run hardest under a full or new moon, in warmer weather, which may not come until May or June, by which time the season is nearly over. This year, rain and snow had left the rivers frothy and high. Eelers were pulling their nets to avoid losing them to the blow. Leaving baby eels trapped in churn was "like puttin' 'em through a washing machine," the patriarch told me.

Loughran set up a makeshift bar in the garage. One night, he invited a bunch of people over. I walked in to find about a dozen fishermen, drinks in hand. Loughran was sitting behind his scale, his laptop open. School had been cancelled for the next day, because of another incoming snowstorm. Bottles of Bacardi Limón and Skrewball peanut-butter whiskey were being drained.

In the corner, Glass was running an aquarium net through the holding tank, cleaning out dead eels and searching for killers. The elver's mortal enemies include trout and raccoons, but eelers most despise sea lice, fingertip-size crustaceans that look as lovely as their name. The lice bite the eels; the eels die. The patriarch fished a brown louse from a garbage barrel, where it had been clinging to the side of an empty Miller Lite box, and showed it to me: "Even that one will cause mass destruction."

The patriarch often eats scallops out of the shell on his boat. He plucked a baby eel from the tank and swallowed it alive. Glass, who is known for his ability to stomach anything, did the same, and said, "Not much taste to 'em." This was an old trick sometimes performed for nosy outsiders. Eleven years ago, an elverman downed a live eel in front of a BuzzFeed reporter and claimed that it tried to crawl back up his throat.

In the human palm, a living mass of glass eels feels like a cold pile of squirm. In captivity, they resemble restless black threads, or pepper that has learned how to move. Eels enjoy density, and often cuddle up in piles. With each scoop of the net, elvers wriggled onto Glass's wrist before appearing to leap back into the water. Glass said, joking a little, "This was the funnest business in the world, but the government doesn't want to see you have fun or make money. We used to be able to go at it unlimited."

"A free-for-all," the patriarch said.

Licensed fishermen could once set as many fykes and catch as many glass eels as they wanted, using a net of any size or type. The patriarch showed me a cell-phone video of someone dumping a funky gumbo of overage back into a river, to comply with the state's limits. The price at the time was twenty-two hundred dollars per pound. The eels would have fetched more than ninety grand.

Like lobster, eel was popular for its affordability and protein before it became an expensive delicacy. In the U.K., elvers are scrambled with eggs. In the Basque country, elvers a la bilbaína are fried in olive oil with chili peppers and garlic. The Scandinavians smoke eels. The Maori roast them in leaves. The Economist once noted that the cooking encyclopedia "Larousse Gastronomique," published in 1938, contains forty-five different recipes for eel. ("To kill an eel, seize it with a cloth and bang its head violently against a hard surface.") Cocktail garnishes are typically inanimate (and non-sentient), but I recently saw a Facebook video of glass eels wriggling around in, supposedly, a cup of sake.

Years ago, John Wyatt Greenlee was working on a doctorate in medieval history when he became intrigued by seventeenth-century maps of London, which showed images of "eel ships" anchored in the Thames. The Dutch had been selling salted eel to England since at least the fourteenth century, and now delivered them live. Calling himself "Surprised Eel Historian, PhD," Greenlee took his findings to Twitter, attracting tens of thousands of followers with trivia (early Britons could pay their rent in eels), cheek ("Eel on Twitter > Elon Twitter"), and activism ("Eels are also a super-important part of stream ecologies"). Greenlee told me, "It's not a panda, or something big and majestic, and it's not a cute otter. Eels are slimy, weird, snakelike things. But they're an umbrella species. Saving them means saving broad swaths of habitat from the ocean all the way up to the headwaters."

Previous eel obsessives have included Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, Linnaeus, and Freud, who published one of his first papers, in 1877, on eels. (He dissected hundreds of them in a futile search for clues to how they reproduce.) Contemporary biologists know more about the eel's reproductive system than Freud did, but the sex life of eels is still a secret that plays out within the pressurized depths of the Sargasso. Despite numerous attempts, no one has ever seen them mate in the wild, or managed to document the hatching of eggs outside of captivity.

The freshwater eel "has a complex life history, parts of which are still shrouded in mystery," Jonna Tomkiewicz, a senior researcher at the National Institute of Aquatic Resources, in Denmark, explained in one of many papers she's written on the subject. Do the larvae live on gelatinous plankton? Marine snow? Where in the water column do they feed? Without this kind of knowledge, researchers are "often operating in the dark." In "Under the Sea-Wind," Rachel Carson observed that when the American eel returned to its sargassum patch to die it "passed from human sight and almost from human knowledge." In his book "Eels," James Prosek, whom the Times has dubbed "a kind of underwater Audubon," calls this final swim "among the greatest unseen migrations of any creature on the planet."

Sam Glass tends to his fyke net. "We used to be able to go at it unlimited," he said.Photograph by Jocelyn Lee for The New Yorker

For adult eels, the trip often involves surviving the turbine blades of hydroelectric dams. A Maine elverman named Randy Bushey once reported finding migrating eels "chopped up in perfect, one-foot chunks." Brian Altvater, Sr., a member of the Passamaquoddy Tribe who is working to restore healthy fish runs to the Schoodic River, on the Canadian border, has pushed for the removal of dams by arguing that "they generate very little electricity compared to the damage that they do to the entire ecosystem."

Elvers are the key to eel aquaculture farming, given the difficulty, as yet, of captive breeding and scalable hatcheries. Japan, which now imports two-thirds of its eel stock, was eying the American eel as early as 1970. The following spring, William Sheldon, a young employee of the Maine Department of Marine Resources with a new degree in wildlife management, embarked on a study to see if the state's elver numbers could support a fishery. He found more than enough, and in a report that is still referenced today, he detailed his observations along with one of his fishing inventions, the "Sheldon trap." (A net with a mesh size "somewhat smaller than ordinary window screening" appeared to work best.) Sheldon also described how to harvest, hold, and transport elvers without killing them. The document was foundational to the fishery that exists today.

When Maine's elver season starts, every March 22nd, eelers pray for warm weather. Some toss a coin in their chosen river, for luck. A couple of days before the opening in 2012, the year after the tsunami in Japan boosted prices, the temperature reached the low eighties, far above average. Julie Keene, a veteran eeler from Lubec, at the northeastern tip of the contiguous United States, got a sunburn and fourteen glass eels. That time of year, the typical number was zero, because the rivers were usually still full of ice. Within a couple of days, she had caught about forty-five thousand—eighteen pounds, a personal best. On the Union River, in Ellsworth, the capital of Down East eeling, fishermen were said to have caught more than a million dollars' worth of glass eels in a single night.

The next year, the fishing was still so good that one elverman tattooed his forearm with an eel, dollar signs, and "2013," memorializing a record season that afforded him, among other things, a new four-wheeler. Rural Mainers could work their entire lives and never see big money, especially all at once, especially Down East, where the median household income was about thirty-six thousand dollars.

Jackpot payouts, in cash, fomented a wild period of interstate elver poaching. Saboteurs sliced their competitors' nets. Untended buckets got taken. Thieves would detach entire tail bags and run off with them. Loughran's father used to have him camp beside their "honey hole" around the clock. A splash in the night, or "hootin' and hollerin'," as one eeler put it, was the sound of fishermen throwing one another into the drink. "There were just hundreds of people poaching," Darrell Young, a prominent elverman, told a filmmaker. Another, Rick Sibley, said that eeling "didn't bring the community together—it tore people apart."

By 2014, the state had imposed its quota, capped the number of elver licenses, limited eelers to two nets, banned cash transactions (buyers must pay with checks), and implemented a swipe-card system to monitor eelers' individual hauls in real time. The regulations were devised in collaboration with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, a long-standing interstate body that works with federal agencies to maintain a sustainable industry. Poaching quieted down. Fishermen who had let their license expire kicked themselves when, in 2018, the price of elvers peaked at twenty-eight hundred dollars a pound. Now it was possible to get back in only through a state lottery.

A fourth-generation sardine packer, Keene started fishing glass eels decades ago, when it paid barely twenty dollars a pound. After the price spiked, she and her longtime boyfriend were able to buy two new trucks, plant an orchard, and build a barn and a garage. "It's changed our life," she said, in an interview for an oral-history project in 2014. "And then let's look at how it's contributing to the rest of the state. We paid sixty thousand dollars in taxes last year. That's enough money to support five families on welfare."

Keene, who considered herself a good steward of Maine's natural resources, told the historian that she had watched "a complete gold rush" nearly destroy sea urchins in the late eighties and early nineties, and that she didn't want to see the same thing happen to eels or any other species. "I believe in having a future," she said. That future already seemed compromised by factors unrelated to conservation. Keene described pervasive drug abuse and a "lot of alcoholism" Down East, where, as in many rural areas, it can be hard to get help. (A record seven hundred and twenty-three Mainers died of overdoses in 2022.) Keene said, "How does a local community hold on just by their fingernails, you know?"

"They say it gets easier after the third demon child."

Cartoon by Dan Rosen

Responsible fishermen don't disapprove of rules; they simply want more of a say in making them. Regulators were worried about the American eel's decline, but fishermen were seeing elvers in what Keene called "Biblical" numbers. Eelers wondered if the regulators were perhaps looking in the wrong place, or conducting their census on nights when eels didn't "go." Keene said, "Just because they didn't go doesn't mean they're not there." No one seemed to know exactly how many elvers there were, or whether any decrease in population was caused by overfishing or more properly attributable to the turbine gantlet and other hazards. Jason Bartlett, a Maine Department of Marine Resources biologist who specializes in eels, told me that he is increasingly worried about a swim-bladder parasite that messes with an eel's buoyancy: "If they can't get off the bottom, they're going to die before they get back to the Sargasso." The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in its most recent significant assessment of A. Rostrata, acknowledged a decline but indicated that "the American eel population is not subject to threats that would imperil its continued existence."

The A.S.M.F.C. Has never increased Maine's over-all quota. Individual quotas are not made public, and fishermen reveal their number about as quickly as they give up their favorite fishing spot. Some of those who remember the unregulated days bristle at any limit ("Fishermen always grumble," one elverman told me), but they were especially infuriated when the lottery was introduced, in 2013, and their quotas stagnated while the state admitted newcomers. Keene said, at the time, "How is that rewarding someone that's been in this fishery, that breathes that fishery? That makes their own gear, that is dependent on it, that understands it, that respects it? I still have a license because I obey the law. How is that rewarding good faith?"

Glass eels are an ideal target for subterfuge, because they run at night and because once they're out of the water it is impossible to prove where they came from. The risk-reward ratio makes them irresistible. Eel smuggling, reportedly a four-billion-dollar-a-year trade spanning at least three continents, has been called the world's least known but most profitable wildlife crime. (The G-7's Financial Action Task Force, a watchdog federation of thirty-nine countries, has identified wildlife trafficking as a "major transnational" racket, on par with arms dealing and drug running.) Glass eels are among the most bootlegged protected species in Europe. In 2021, an investigation into the assassination of the Haitian President Jovenel Moïse revealed that his government had been bearing down on traffickers of narcotics, weapons—and eels. Moïse believed that the eel trade should be regulated and taxed, the Times reported, noting, "Many of the eels go to China, but the Haitian police are investigating the industry as a way to launder illicit profits."

Glass eels have been found in passengers' luggage at airports in Amsterdam and Brussels. In 2017, British border agents checked cargo bound for Hong Kong and discovered, hidden beneath a batch of iced fish, four hundred and forty pounds of illicitly harvested elvers. Half were dead. The smuggler had allegedly spent two years trafficking more than five million eels, with a market value of nearly seventy million dollars. He used a warehouse in Gloucestershire as a way station, and the eels had been sourced in Spain. Smugglers there have operated in Algeciras and Tarifa, at the southern tip of the continent, just across the Strait of Gibraltar from Morocco, which has restricted elver fishing since 2011.

Although A. Anguilla tends to be the most trafficked eel species, in 2022, Hong Kong alone imported almost twenty-eight thousand pounds of rostrata from the United States, according to Hiromi Shiraishi, a researcher at Chuo University. The amount far exceeded the quotas in Maine and South Carolina combined. When I asked Maine's fishing commissioner, Patrick Keliher, to explain the discrepancy, he told me, through a spokesperson, "Elvers from Maine are being tracked very closely, and it's our belief that if there are additional elvers entering the supply chain, it's because of the illegal activity that has been so prevalent in Canada the last two years."

In Canada, glass eels are the most valuable seafood by weight. Last year, a woman who lived near Hubbards Cove, in Nova Scotia, was alarmed to wake at three in the morning to see men outside, in balaclavas, taking glass eels from a stream. In another incident, a dispute over eels ended with one man reportedly assaulting another with a pipe. Canada's minister of fisheries and oceans temporarily shut down the country's fishery, saying, "It was simply too dangerous to let this continue."

Elver fishing in Canada was cancelled again this year, but eelers went on eeling. (By late April, the authorities had charged ninety-five people with doing so, including five Mainers.) First Nation members argued that treaty rights exempted them from federal regulations. In a Facebook video, a First Nation fisherman named Cory Francis announced plans to set fykes on the Annis River in Yarmouth County, Nova Scotia, a hundred and twenty-two miles across the Gulf of Maine, and declared Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans a "criminal element" and a "rogue group." Accusing the agency of "racially profiling Indigenous people," he said, "You can go fuck off."

Not long after conducting his seminal elver study, Sheldon, the Maine Department of Marine Resources employee, left government service to become a lobsterman. His boat sank, and he turned to eeling. He both fished and operated as a buyer, once explaining to a TV news station, "The small man can get into it." The license plate on his truck read "EEL WAGN." A sign in his headquarters, in Ellsworth, said "Smoking is permitted here in the shop. Lying is to be expected. Everyone welcome here."

Sheldon often talked to the media. He was the one who swallowed a live eel in front of the BuzzFeed reporter. In that reporter's profile, published in 2013, we find Sheldon in his sixties, with both a flare gun and a 40-calibre Glock, serving bucket-bearing customers at a temporary headquarters set up in a cheap motel room. He's on the phone with "Chinese guys who wired him $600,000 on handshake deals." The year before, Sheldon had "paid his fishermen $12 million for elvers (about a third of the estimated $40 million paid out in Maine over the season)."

What few knew then was that federal agents had launched an interstate poaching investigation, called Operation Broken Glass. Baby eels were being harvested up and down the East Coast in places that banned elver fishing, and passed off as having come from Maine. Dealers were knowingly buying and selling illicit elvers, learning only too late that they'd been talking to undercover officers. Twenty-one men were ultimately charged with trafficking more than five million dollars' worth of glass eels.

Sheldon was one of them. By the time federal agents raided his business, he was considered the grandfather of the industry in Maine. Sheldon had "cornered the market, basically," a fellow-elverman later said. In federal court, a prosecutor noted, "By his own pronouncement and by the consensus of the community, he knows more about elver fishing than anyone."

In October, 2017, Sheldon pleaded guilty to trafficking two hundred and sixty-eight pounds of glass eels from states where elver fishing is illegal. "Bill Sheldon not only facilitated a black market in illegal elvers—he encouraged it," the federal prosecutor said, at sentencing. "He didn't just buy illegal elvers—he provided poachers with advice and equipment. He didn't just dodge the law himself—he told other people what to say if they got caught." The prosecutor told the judge, "This was just greed."

In court, Sheldon minimized, as defendants do. He claimed to have made, at most, thirty thousand dollars on his crime, and expressed shame and regret for "poor judgment." His lawyer requested home confinement instead of incarceration, arguing that Sheldon was a good, stable person: married for nearly fifty years, a father of two, a grandfather of four, no prior felonies. Hardships were enumerated: a sick father, the sunk boat. Worst of all, Sheldon's daughter Deb had killed herself as his case unfolded. Sheldon told the judge, "I will forever feel like I was responsible."

Sheldon was sentenced to six months in prison and three years of probation—a fitting punishment, the judge said, for "significant deception" and for helping to create and clandestinely support a black market. His probation ended a few years ago. He gave up his dealer license but was allowed to keep fishing, and went to work for a Maine-based company co-owned by Mitchell Feigenbaum, a former Philadelphia lawyer who moved to Canada decades ago to become an eel exporter. Feigenbaum had testified on Sheldon's behalf at sentencing, and tried to differentiate him from the "rough, tough, mean, nasty, hard individuals" typical of their industry. He told the judge, "Our product is all going to one place. It's the Chinese government. State-owned industries are pretty much our sole consumer for this product. They want it as cheap as possible. They will engage in predatory practices that would make your head spin, including a lot of the poaching."

Although Sheldon remains an influential figure in eeling, he no longer takes questions. (He did not respond to mine.) He and his supporters blamed "the media" for the death of his daughter—a mother of two, a registered nurse, a Steelers fan who refused to shit-talk the Patriots, a smoker who was trying to quit, an alcoholic who already had. "The various stories about Bill and the stress it brought to the family had a negative impact," one of his defense documents said.

The Sheldon case left a lot of fishermen even more wary than usual. Loughran told me, "It's a fragile industry, and bad publicity could be very detrimental to it." Last year, when I initially expressed interest in writing about glass eels, someone posted on Facebook, "I smell Fed." One person liked the comment: Sheldon.

On a recent night, the patriarch and his son drove to a back-road bridge north of Acadia National Park and parked downslope on a concrete boat ramp. The headlamps of their truck illuminated little more than a wedge of flotsam. The only other light was the sickly twinkle off a scattering of stars. As I crossed the bridge on foot, it was so dark that I could have walked into an elephant.

The men were wearing waders, hoodies, and yellow rubber gloves up to their elbows. One of them flicked on a powerful flashlight. From the bridge, I watched them traverse an inhospitable stretch of beach and climb the jagged riprap, moving toward the bridge piling where their fyke net was tethered. The outgoing tide churned between the pilings with the noisy velocity of floodwaters. Grasping one of the tethers, the patriarch waded into the buffeting rush. He untied one end of the tail bag and emptied it into a plastic bait bucket that his son was holding. Then he re-tied the bag and secured the tether, and the two of them returned to the truck.

Back home, they found Loughran waiting at the garage. It was one-thirty in the morning. Eelers on the Presumpscot River, another elver stronghold, further south, were "slaughtering," Loughran reported. That meant having a good night.

Glass eels are so translucent that a Maine fisherman once called them "ghosts on the water."Photograph by Jocelyn Lee for The New Yorker

The patriarch's son set an aquarium net over the top of an empty bucket and strained the first of their sludge. The pour revealed sea lice, krill, a needlefish, and a bunch of twitchy sticklebacks, as silver as store-bought fishing lures—bycatch, all of which gets returned to the river. Cupping the net from the bottom, the patriarch teased the few glass eels into view and plucked them out, the way you'd pick lint off a sweater. He said, "We have to work harder for ours than they do down in southern Maine. They don't get out of bed for this little bit." I understood what he meant when I later saw a video in which two eelers struggled to lift a tail bag so full that they might as well have been trying to move a bo