Westport Island fisherman Jon Williams dedicates part of each year to go after hagfish, but that doesn’t mean he likes it. He finds reasons not to be on his boats when it’s time to haul up barrels of the slimy fish.
“I’m glad it’s not my regular fishery,” Williams said. His crew shares the sentiment. “They’d much prefer to fish crabs…but everyone needs a paycheck.”
Fishing for hagfish, also known as slime eels, offers a handful of Maine fishermen a supplemental fishery to accompany lobster or crab. Hagfish doesn’t compare to lobster in price, Williams fetches $0.85 a pound for them if he freezes them himself, but they’re easy to catch. All you need is rope, weighted drums, rotten bait and a strong stomach. Fishermen often haul up drums so full that the fish have squeezed out all the water.
“They’ll suffocate each other if you let them soak too long,” said Williams.
But the ease of the fishery comes with a price. Hagfish are legendary for excreting gallons of nauseating slime when stressed. Even when they’re un-slimed, they aren’t the most appetizing fish in the sea. They’re only popular for use in select Korean cuisine and for leather. The vast majority of hagfish caught are exported to South Korea.
The relatively-new hagfish fishery is small enough to fly under the regulatory radar. In 2008, three dealers in Maine reported just over 637,000 pounds in landings, according to the Maine Department of Marine Resources. No statistics are available for 2009 because only two dealers reported to the state, below the privacy threshold for public records. Save for some rope regulations to avoid right whale entanglements, there is little state statute covering hagfish.
No license is required to fish for hagfish, so it’s impossible to know how many Maine boats are dedicated to the fishery. An informal survey of regional hagfish stakeholders for this story suggests it could be less than 20. Those that fish for slime eels often do so sporadically and/or seasonally.
Hagfish is what helped keep Cherrypoint Products in Milbridge open year-round until a conflict with a distributor halted hagfish production last year. The fish processing plant provides 20 jobs. Co-owner Drusilla Ray says all of the hagfish for her factory come from four or five local fishing boats. She hopes to restart hagfish packaging for this summer and fall.
“If all goes as planned, we will go full-steam ahead,” Ray said.
Though the fishery is small, it has raised concerns among groundfishermen about gear conflicts. Justin “Buzz” Libby, a Port Clyde fisherman, said he’s had mixed results communicating with hagfish fishermen about trap placements and his trawling routes. Many of the hagfish fishermen in the Gulf of Maine are from Massachusetts, he said, and are hard to reach.
“Sometimes they work with you, sometimes they’re never here,” he said.
Because hagfish traps are less costly than lobster traps, he said, many slime eel fishermen lay them scattershot. He knows of some Downeast waters that are impossible to trawl because of the density of hagfish traps.
“They literally had covered every inch of the trawl,” Libby said. “They’re just littered everywhere.”
When a groundfish trawl becomes ensnared with a hagfish trap, the snare proves disastrous, said Libby. On occasion, he’s had to go back to port for repairs. Once, an ensnared hagfish trap nearly keeled his boat over.
“Luckily for me, it was flat calm that day,” Libby said. “It could have been lethal.”
But Williams points out that there always will be gear conflict, no matter the fishery. He said that while he makes a point to contact any groundfisherman he sees to alert him about trap placements, hagfish fishermen have as much right to the water as anyone else.
“I see nothing on the chart in the Gulf of Maine that says ‘Groundfish Only,'” Williams said.
Some conservationists are concerned that the hagfish fishery is in danger of depleting an aquatic resource before the resource’s importance is fully understood. Scientists have more questions than answers about the hagfish, but they do know the fish play an important role in recycling nutrients on the ocean floor.
Hagfish reproduce slowly, and they have been overfished in several parts of the world, including around the Korean peninsula. Anecdotal evidence suggests overfishing already may be occurring in New England, said University of New Hampshire researcher Dr. Stacia Sower.
“Here, the fishermen tell me they have to go further and further off-shore to get hagfish,” Sower said.
Nine years ago, overfishing concerns sparked an insider effort among New England slime eel fishermen, scientists and a prominent Gloucester slime eel processor to call for regulation of the fishery. 13 local hagfish stakeholders, concerned with an explosion of international boats hunting the fish, petitioned the New England Fishery Management Council in 2001 to establish a control date and develop a fishery management plan.
At the time, the fishery was small enough for stakeholders to find common ground, recalled Anne Beaudreau, a researcher at the University of Washington who worked as an analyst for the New England council from 2001 to 2003.
“The fishery was so small that we could all sit in a room and come to a consensus,” she said.
Beaudreau compiled a report in 2003 that backed the petition of the stakeholders, but the council declined to act on the report and has yet to take any action.
“I think that an opportunity was missed,” Beaudreau said.
Patricia Fiorelli, a public affairs officer for the council said there simply isn’t enough staff to regulate all species that are being fished in small amounts.
Without the regulations that would trigger mandates to create baseline studies and counts of slime eel landings, there is no way to tell whether the fishery’s value outweighs the cost of its conflicts with other fisheries in the Gulf of Maine.
Craig Idlebrook is a freelance writer based in Ellsworth.