Editor’s Desk: Behind the slippery story of eel smuggling
In our latest story, reporter Rene Ebersole takes us far behind the sushi bar to explore the provenance of a popular item — unagi, or eel. The story, “Inside the multimillion-dollar world of eel trafficking,” was produced with National Geographic. It takes Ebersole to Maine, where dealers pay fishermen thousands of dollars for tiny “glass eels” which are then sent to Asia to be raised in aquaculture operations into full-size eels. From there, they are processed and grilled and sent to sushi bars the world over.
The amount of money swooshing around this eel-catch system has been so large in recent years that it has given rise to overfishing, restrictions on catches, and the almost inevitable smuggling that occurs when a high-value product is in short supply. Fisherman just scraping by suddenly begin earning six-figure incomes, dealers haul around garbage bags full of cash in their cars, and undercover agents from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration run sting operations on rogue exporters. Meanwhile, the local economy in Maine gets millions of dollars from the trade.
The focus of the story is the “alleged kingpin of one of the biggest domestic wildlife smuggling operations ever to hit the East Coast,” as Ebersole puts it—a man who helped create the region’s eel industry back in the 1970s and now stands accused, with another defendant, of illegally trafficking those eels. Both men have pleaded not guilty.
The story speaks to the bigger issue of what happens when consumer demand overwhelms a wild species, in this case, the American eel that roams the rivers from Greenland to South America and spawns in the Sargasso Sea, near Bermuda. The future may lie in a more sustainable catch, but until then the eels could find themselves in a losing race with the growing number of diners at sushi counters looking for a bite of grilled eel over rice.
This is our latest in-depth story of fishing run amok. We hope you enjoy it, and that you will consider supporting our work with talented reporters like Ebersole. We’ve got a limited-time gift offer running over at thefern.org/donate if you generously choose to support us with a monthly donation.