How A Hunger For Eels Sparked A Bustling Black Market

The following is an excerpt from Slippery Beast: A True Crime Natural History, with Eels by Ellen Ruppel Shell.

When you purchase products through the Bookshop.org link on this page, Science Friday earns a small commission which helps support our journalism.

Buy The Book

Slippery Beast: A True Crime Natural History, with Eels

Buy

In Maine, the American eel reveals itself reluctantly. Maybe that’s because its waking hours don’t comport with our own. Or because eel season flashes by so quickly. Or because eels lack the star power of lobster, oysters, or even clams. Whatever the reason, eels don’t make much of a splash in the Pine Tree State. So it came as a surprise to learn that Maine is a veritable Fort Knox of American eels.

Oh, please, you may be thinking, it’s not just Maine. And you would be right. Eels are shy and lie low after sunrise, so they are easy to miss. But east of the Mississippi the American eel lurks in countless marshes, creeks, rivers, lakes, streams, and inlets. Maybe you’ve spotted one while out skinny-dipping on a starry night. Or glimpsed one in the beak of a soaring raptor. Or reeled one in—unbidden—on a fishing line. Or maybe not. It’s easy to be fooled, for there are many imposters.

The lamprey, that bloodsucking parasite, looks very much like the eel that it’s not. The three species of “electric eels,” genus Electrophorus, have stronger genetic ties to catfish than to the eel. Sea snakes, reptiles with lungs and paddle-like tails, are often confused for eels. So, that “eel” you see in your mind’s eye may not be an eel at all. And then again, it may well be.

A century ago, in some parts of the world, especially England, it was difficult not to encounter freshwater eels of some variety. British naturalist Charles J. Cornish observed them swarming “in such tens of millions they made a black margin to the river on either side of the bank, where they swam because the current was the weakest.” Chemist and poet Sir Humphrey Davy, president of the British Royal Society, was unparalleled in his keen observations of the natural world, and absolutely fascinated by eels. In his Salmonia, or Days of Fly Fishing, composed a year before his death in 1829, he notes this rather gruesome demonstration of eel self-sacrifice and tenacity: “It was a cold backward summer and when I was at Ballyshannon, about the end of July, the mouth of the river, which had been in flood all this month, under the fall, was blackened by millions of little eels about as long as the finger, which were constantly urging their way up the moist rocks by the side of the fall. Thousands died, but their bodies, remaining moist, served as the ladder for others to make their way; and I saw some ascending even perpendicular stones, making their road through the wet moss or adhering to some eels that had died in the attempt.”

Clearly, eels are prepared to exist where less determined creatures might perish, and under the most varied—and daunting— conditions. The European eel, once so plentiful on the Thames, is also pleased to find itself inhabiting waterways from the north of Norway to the Sebou River region of Morocco. The Japanese eel sweeps from the northern island of Hokkaido to the Philippines. The American eel feels at home in waters from Greenland to Venezuela. Over time I developed a habit of asking scientists if any other freshwater fish can claim such a far-flung domain. They hesitated, looked skyward, furled their brows. Then came the hedge: “None . . . that I can think of.”

So yes, eels seem to be everywhere and are therefore familiar. But if familiarity breeds contempt, eels are the exception at least in the culinary sense: eaters the world over simply cannot get enough of them. In Morocco, eel is steamed into tagines. In Italy, it is threaded on skewers and roasted with bay leaves. In northeastern India, it finds its way into curries. Smoked eel is a delicacy across eastern Europe and parts of Scandinavia, and in Denmark and Belgium, pickled eel is a treat. The British embrace their jellied eel—chopped and boiled in stock that cools and sets and is sometimes baked into a pie. (This delicacy is traced to Victorian London, where in the nineteenth century eel was one of the very few fish to thrive in the River Thames, then known as the “Great Stink.”) Larousse Gastronomique, the definitive guide to French cooking first published in 1938, lists forty-five different recipes for eel, simply marinated and broiled, say, or long poached in a stew of onions. (Squeamish readers may prefer not to know that aspiring chefs are advised to slaughter the eel by slamming its head repeatedly on a counter and putting a “noose around its base” before peeling off the skin.) Chinese chefs treat eel as they do other animal proteins— steamed with black beans, simmered in soups, stir-fried with ginger and garlic shoots, or used as a stuffing for chicken or duck.

So, what of eel eaters in the United States? In The American Plate, published in 2015, the food historian Libby O’Connell surprised me, pointing out that Americans once vastly preferred eel to lobster. To be fair, this was not a high bar: in nineteenth-century Maine, lobster was derided as a “cockroach of the sea,” fit mostly for prisoners and indentured servants and as an ingredient in fertilizer. Still, O’Connell describes eel as “a gourmet’s dream,” so popular it made a cameo appearance in the 1796 classic American Cookery, the comprehensive culinary compendium thought to be the first cookbook penned by an American and published in the United States. In 1884, the U.S. Department of Fisheries reported on the nation’s eel fishery—Massachusetts alone claimed an annual harvest of 400,000 pounds. Americans happily ate fried, stewed, pickled, and broiled eel until what historians call the Progressive Era, the 1890s to the 1920s, a time of political and economic reform when distinctive ethnic dietary preferences gave way to a homogeneous national cuisine. At the time, wild-caught fish and game of many varieties—though fashionable with the rich and a necessity for the poor—fell off the menu of “respectable” middle-class American households seeking the ease and status of prepared and store-bought foods. Eel, a common fish whose preparation required skill and patience, was first among the causalities. Ogden Nash, famed twentieth-century writer of light verse, compressed common opinion into this snappy scrap of doggerel: “I don’t mind eels / except as meals.”

By World War II, the ranks of eel aficionados in the United States had all but dwindled to small enclaves of European and Asian immigrants. Some trace the nation’s anti-eel sentiment to the “yuck factor” evoked by the industrial-age contaminants tainting the nation’s rivers. There is merit to this argument: the widespread use of insecticides led to concerns about chronic ingestion of heavy metals from residues leaking from farmers’ fields into lakes and rivers. But this concern did not trickle down to the general public, which remained largely unaware of the dangers. Into the late 1930s and early 1940s, the only analyses carried out for chemical contaminants in foods were for lead arsenate and other arsenical pesticides in fruits. Freshwater fish, it seems, were not really a concern.

A more likely reason for America’s collective turn away from eel is that, as a whole, Americans have never been drawn to seafood of any variety. In Iceland, an island nation, residents eat 200 pounds of fish a year. The Spanish consume 101 pounds of seafood annually, the French 75 pounds, the Italians nearly 63 pounds, and the Germans 31 pounds. Americans consume on average just 19 pounds. Why Americans eat so little fish and shellfish is not well understood. But there are clues. The food industry analyst Helene York was only half joking when she said that Americans avoid fish because “despite how it’s marketed, most seafood doesn’t taste like chicken.” I’m not sure I agree: nearly 70 percent of the fish eaten in the United States is purchased in restaurants, and a good portion of that, dunked in batter, deep fried, and served on a bun with sauce and cheese, could easily pass for chicken or almost anything else. So I don’t think the question of why Americans eschew seafood can be reduced to a mere matter of taste. In surveys, many of us admit that the real reason we don’t eat fish at home is that we don’t know how to cook it and don’t want to learn, as we can’t stomach the smell or feel of it. We are trained by advertisers and marketers to prioritize convenience, and the eel, with its slimy, mucus-coated skin and snakelike torso, is devilishly challenging to prepare at home. For this reason alone, it makes sense that American eel—once so popular—fell out of favor.

Until, that is, we discovered sushi.

America’s first taste of raw fish on vinegared rice is often traced to the 1960s or ’70s. But the food historian H. D. Miller wants to correct the historical record. From his reading, sushi landed on the American West Coast with a surge of Japanese immigrants sometime closer to 1900. Apparently, wealthy celebrities were especially taken with the exotic dish, which they served at parties and other gatherings featured in the society pages. Imagine the excitement when in 1904 the Los Angeles Herald reported socialite Fern Dell Higgins surprising guests with a spread in which “Japanese sushi . . . was the principal feature.”

The food fads of the rich are known to trickle down to plebeian tables, but at this time in history, sushi never stood a chance. American interest in the dish cooled quickly after the Immigration Act of 1924 banned the Japanese from entering the United States, and any residual enthusiasm was sharply diminished after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. It would be more than twenty years before sushi found its rightful place on the American table.

In The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice, author Trevor Corson reports that interest in the dish was rekindled in 1966, when the food importer Noritoshi Kanai partnered with Chicago businessman Harry Wolff Jr. to open the nation’s first modern sushi bar inside Kawafuku, then the “grandest restaurant” in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles. The lavish, L-shaped sushi bar looked boldly out on an ice-lined raw fish display that was particularly popular with wealthy Japanese businessmen, some of whom sent word of it back to their home country. Apparently, this inspired other chefs who felt constrained by Japan’s demanding and restrictive sushi culture to try their hand in the United States.

So, what does sushi have to do with eel? That’s a bit of a story, so bear with me. Unlike sushi, “unagi” ( Japanese for freshwater eel) is never eaten raw. We’ll dig into the whys of this later, but for now, let’s just think of unagi, which is always served cooked, as a gateway drug to sushi, which is always served raw; and think of sushi, which is often made of familiar fish like salmon, as a gateway drug to the less familiar eel. The owners of Kawafuku understood this symbiotic relationship between sushi and unagi and reasoned that if Japanese restaurants in the United States were persuaded to serve sushi, a lucrative supply chain could be built to support their national cuisine in which pricey eel featured prominently. Vintage Kawafuku menus—still available online—highlight not one but two broiled eel dishes, the restaurant’s most expensive items. Meanwhile, sushi was on the rise. Not every American relished the idea of eating raw fish, but enough did to stir the beginnings of a craze. The New York Times food writer Craig Claiborne got in early, declaring Japanese food a “trend” in 1963. Claiborne, a sharp observer of culinary trends, noted that “New Yorkers seem to take to the raw fish dishes, sashimi and sushi, with almost the same enthusiasm they display for tempura and sukiyaki.” Still, he cautioned that “sushi may seem a bit ‘far out’ for many American palates,” and at the time perhaps it was. But thanks to a cascade of influences—including the resounding success of the television miniseries Shogun, based on James Clavell’s historical novel set in seventeenth-century Japan—by the early 1980s, sushi was swimming freely in the American gastronomic mainstream. Coast to coast, consumers were swamped in supermarket sushi, truck-stop sushi, vegan sushi, fusion sushi, and nearly two thousand sushi restaurants catering to the craze. (Today, that number is closer to twenty thousand.)

As Kanai and Wolff predicted, eel, too, took off, and not just in LA. In 1983, Mimi Sheraton, Claiborne’s successor at the Times, singled out “broiled eel wrapped in paper-thin sheaves of cucumber” in a coveted four-star review of Hatsuhana, a Japanese restaurant in Midtown Manhattan. But what Sheraton and other enthusiasts failed to mention (and perhaps did not know) was that by then, the Japanese eel in which they delighted was under threat.

Japan, by far the world’s largest consumer of freshwater eel, has a history of favoring its native species, which meant that traditional Asian eel production and cuisine was grounded in Japanese eel. But as international demand for Japanese eel exploded, the species grew scarce and catches plummeted from more than 200 metric tons (440,000 pounds) in 1957 to less than twenty metric tons (44,000 pounds) in the 1980s. When Mimi Sheraton wrote her four-star review of Hatsuhana, the Japanese eel fishery—at about 10 percent of peak—had all but collapsed, while in Japan the price of glass eels and elvers soared. This made baby eels catnip for organized crime. Illicitly sourced glass eels accounted for much of Japanese eel production, which was sometimes linked to yakuza gangs, the Japanese mafia. These illegal operations relied on the patronage of large, industrial eel farms, many of them in China, outfitted with their own processing and packaging facilities to make it easy to skirt official oversight and sell eel products directly to department stores and supermarkets. This practice did not bode well for the survival of the Japanese eel species, which by the turn of the last century was essentially on life support.

It was not until February 2013 that the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) listed the Japanese eel as endangered, as did the Japanese Ministry of Environment. Exports were—and are—severely limited: today Japan imports 40 percent of the world’s traded freshwater eel supply and exports only 1 percent. And again, pretty much all of the eel Japan imports is cultivated from wild-caught eel fry, most of it American eel.

During the 2020 fishing season, government sources reported a combined eleven tons of glass eels caught legally in twenty-four of Japan’s forty-seven prefectures. But that number did not square with the seventeen tons of domestically caught glass eels growing in Japan’s aquaculture operations that year. The government confessed that six tons, roughly 40 precent of the total, were from “unknown” sources that probably included yakuza gangs. In 2021, a poacher from Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four main islands, patiently outlined his logic to a reporter: “Official traders are only prepared to buy glass eels at low prices so I sell my catches through unofficial channels where higher prices can be charged.” Since the “unofficial” price can be three times that of the official government price, fishermen had every incentive to sell as much eel as possible off the books, a process that hastened the Japanese eel’s catastrophic decline. Since 2023 there’s been a crackdown on dodgy actors: poachers and dealers who once got barely a slap on the wrist now risk a quarter-million-dollar fine and three years in prison. Of course, no matter how harsh, regulations mean very little without enforcement. Given that roughly 40 percent of glass eels traded in Japan are still obtained from unknown sources, it’s assumed that poaching of Japanese eels is rampant, and it remains to be seen whether the species will ever fully recover.

As the Japanese eel dwindled, Asian dealers and farmers pivoted to its European cousin: by the late 1990s, more than 70 percent of Chinese fish farms were growing European eels. With the rising demand and growing pressure, it didn’t take long for that fishery, too, to crash. In 2007 the European eel was listed in Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), a multilateral treaty to regulate the trade in endangered species. Three years later, in 2010, the European Union banned the trading of live eels outside the EU, and limited trade by non-EU eel exporting countries like Tunisia and Morocco. These measures, while effective, came far too late—in 2013, the IUCN declared the European species “critically endangered,” which is to say, at risk of extinction in the wild.

Ironically, in its attempts to regulate the eel trade, Europe unwittingly cleared a path for illegal actors. The calculus comes down to this: the tighter the regulations, the scarcer the glass eels and elvers, the higher the price, and the greater the incentive to steal them. The European eel’s soaring profitability caught the attention of treasure seekers the world over, including international criminal networks and their syndicates. (Interestingly, some small-scale elver poachers quit the practice, frightened away by the perceived threat of organized crime.)

Those small-time poachers had reason to worry: eel mules are relentless. In 2021 Malaysian-born seafood trader Gilbert Khoo was convicted of smuggling 6.5 tons of live Spain-caught eels past multiple border agents to a barn in Gloucester, U.K., with the intent of shipping them via Hong Kong to Chinese eel farmers. Potential street value of the eels grown to full adult size: $290 million euros. Two years earlier, French customs officers at Charles de Gaulle Airport arrested a pair of dealers on their way to Kunming, China. While the pair protested and denied any wrongdoing, the police found 300,000 live elvers packed in plastic baggies (one kilo per bag) cooled with frozen water bottles wrapped in thermal blankets and packed neatly in their suitcases. These incidents reflect just a fraction of the underground elver trade: roughly 100 tons of European eel was seized from illegal traders in 2020 alone. And despite stronger laws, matters are not improving. In the spring of 2023, Spain’s Civil Guard, in a joint operation with the French National Gendarmerie, Europol, and the European Anti-Fraud Office, seized 1.5 tons of live elvers and arrested twenty-seven suspects. As one eel scientist told me over a couple of beers: “It’s a f@#king shit show.”

Okay, so the European and Japanese eel are having a tough time of it. But what, you may ask, does that have to do with the American eel or, for that matter, Maine? Another excellent question with a simple answer: no eel species stands alone, as the fate of one sought-after eel species is linked inexorably to the fate of the others. Just weeks before the export ban on European eels was triggered, the river price for American elvers in Maine soared nearly nineteenfold—from less than $100 a pound in 2009 to about $1,870 a pound in 2012. For struggling fishermen, elvers were suddenly “dollars in the water.” And while a dollar may not sound like a lot, consider that an American elver weighs only about 0.2 grams, or roughly 0.0004 of a pound. (That’s about half of what European elvers weigh as they near shore, so there are nearly twice as many American as European elvers to a pound.) A cupful of elvers pulled out with a hand net could pay the grocery bill for a month or the electricity bill for a year. A bucketful of elvers might pay off a truck loan, or a hospital bill. And that’s baby fish taken straight from the river. Eel farmers using those fry as brood stock have it even sweeter. Andrew Kerr, the UK-based chairman of the Sustainable Eel Group, was kind enough to do the math. “Think about it,” he said. “A ton of elvers amounts to five thousand tons of adult eels. The profit in that just blows the mind.”

These “mind-blowing” payoffs make smuggling and poaching all but inevitable. As we know, elvers are extremely difficult to count and nearly impossible to track, but the evidence is quite strong that the number of eels grown in China’s aquaculture operations far exceeds the number of elvers legally imported into that country. The Chinese government reports that between the years 1995 and 2000 China generated an average of 1.5 metric tons (that’s 3,300 pounds) of adult eel for every kilogram (2.2 pounds) of glass eels it grew up on its farms. This comes down to 1,500 kilograms of adult eel for each kilogram of baby eel, a truly remarkable multiple well beyond the expected forty-to-one ratio for American elvers. Yet, apparently, this was just a start. Between 2001 and 2008, China reported that its fish farms generated about 4.5 metric tons of adult eel for every kilogram of imported elvers, a ratio of 4,500 to one. Between 2009 and 2015, the multiple mysteriously jumped again to an astonishing 15 metric tons—more than 33,000 pounds—of adult eel for every 2.2 pounds of elvers. No doubt China has mastered the art and science of elver farming, but to attribute this astonishing leap in productivity to improved technology, better feed, or other factors stretches credulity into the realm of magical thinking. A far more likely explanation for China’s extraordinary eel production is that many tons of eel are grown up from elvers that have entered the country illegally. And by far the largest share of that contraband comes in the form of American eel.

In January 2024, a pair of Japanese scholars named Hiromi Shiraishi and Kenzo Kaifu published a paper titled “Early Warning of an Upsurge in International Trade of the American Eel” in the journal Marine Policy. In the article, they reported East Asian customs data indicating that imports of live elvers from the Americas to Hong Kong grew from 2 tons in 2004 to 53 tons in 2021 to an incredible 157 tons in 2022. Imports from the Americas—all presumably the American species—accounted for 89 percent of all live elver imports to East Asia that year. (East Asian nations and territories account for fully 98 percent of the world’s Anguilla farming production.) Nearly 13 tons, 26,000 pounds, came from the United States. And while the bulk of these imports—more than 100 tons—were imported from Haiti (a nearly tenfold increase from 2021), more than 99 percent of Haitian elvers were traded via dealers in Canada and the United States. The authors concluded that “it is reasonable to conclude that currently A. rostrata [American eel] is arguably the most extensively exploited Anguilla species in the world.”

Sheila Eyler, project leader with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office, has devoted much of her career to managing the American eel with the mission of protecting it. She’s proud of her work but not convinced that it’s enough. “We’re very good at fishing down populations until they are gone,” she sighed gloomily. Eyler and her team are doing what they can to stanch the bleeding, notably working with stakeholders to ensure eels safer passage in their upriver migration. No doubt that has helped. But as a scientist, Eyler had far less control over the demand side of the eel equation. The sudden surge in demand for the American eel, she said, came as a complete surprise to her and other regulators. “No one ever envisioned that the market would go crazy,” she told me. From the vantage point of a scientist, one can understand why this market frenzy came as a calamitous surprise. But those who sought eels to make their fortunes were poised to take full advantage of the madness. And that is precisely what they did.

Excerpted from SLIPPERY BEAST: A True Crime Natural History, with Eels by Ellen Ruppel Shell. Copyright © 2024 by Ellen Ruppel Shell. Published and reprinted by permission of Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved.