How do you know it's time?
In Grand Lake Stream, the northern Maine/Wabanakik town renowned as a hunting and fishing hub, eager anglers stand hip deep in the stream’s current and cast. Petroglyph sentinels carved by Wabanaki ancestors thousands of years prior keep watch nearby. A stone's throw from the town center, we are in a screened-in gazebo in Dave and Deb Tobey’s backyard. Dave Tobey is a registered Maine Guide (one of five generations) who has long stitched together a living from the natural resources in the area. On this late August evening, deer stroll casually by as Dave recounts stories from over five decades of guiding hunters, trappers, and fishermen. He also shares his deep knowledge of the American eel.
Dave has been an eel fisherman for many decades, having learned from his grandfather's friends. The juvenile glass eel (elver) fishery is what gets the most attention–especially since demand from Asia’s aquaculture industry sent prices north of $2000 a pound–but catching adult (silver) eels is the traditional harvest, practiced by Wabanaki and their ancestors since time immemorial.
Dave always fished for adult eels. His harvest used to go to dealers that sold them for culinary use until Maine’s commercial adult eel fishery closed in 2014. Since then, a special license has allowed Dave to sell to new clients: biologists hired by hydropower dam operators to study fish passage through or around dams. Hardy silver eels make for a perfect study fish–placed upstream of dams and ready for outward migration, they can swim with tracking devices that reveal the different paths they take, as well as indicate mortality and its causes.
A lifetime in the outdoors observing things yields particular knowledge–Dave has observed that mature silver eels answering the call to return to the Sargasso Sea leave earlier from one nearby tributary than another. He thinks this is because it is a longer route to the sea from the first stream than the other. The eels in these two nearby streams experience similar conditions and the same temperatures, at the same time. How do they know when it’s time to leave? What are they sensing, or remembering?
How do we know when it’s time? Time to reach out, time to ask how someone is doing, time to take the pie out of the oven, time to leave safe harbors and venture into the current. Sometimes we can point to the cues that guide us. Often, the exact mix of reasons and variables is a slippery beast to grasp.
One way that eels mark time (or are marked by it) is through the growth of tiny bone-like structures in their ears called “otoliths.” Researchers extract (tiny!) eel otoliths, bisect them, then use a microscope to view the “growth rings” they contain, similar to the growth rings of a tree.
A film cannot be bisected and its growth read in the same way, but imagine you could take such a slice of our future film–it would reveal peaks and troughs of activity in our notes, lean periods in our filming, bursts of activity, a tapestry of email and message threads, a growing archive of image and sound files...
The Elversphere is a film-in-progress, a platform for dialogue and exchange of information, and now, a newsletter. Our fascinations with eels and the people who fish for them started years ago, our conversations with each other about collaboration on a film started in 2023, the idea for a newsletter spawned this past winter.
For the past two decades in midcoast Maine, September means documentary filmmakers and industry folks from around the world converge at the Camden International Film Festival (CIFF). This year, these local kids have made good- we were invited to participate as LEF/CIFF fellows for The Elversphere film project! 🎉
Temperatures are cooling, filmmakers and industry folks have just left Camden, silver eels are feeling the call of the open ocean… and for the launch of The Elversphere newsletter, it’s time.
Yours in eels,
Eli & Michele
The Elversphere team
PROJECT UPDATES
The Elversphere received a LEF/CIFF fellowship!
Read more here.
This program, developed in partnership with the LEF Foundation, offers five New England–based filmmakers with feature documentaries in production or post-production the opportunity to attend CIFF for project development workshops and industry meetings.
Deep gratitude to the stellar humans at the Points North Institute and LEF Foundation for their support.
The Elversphere at the Belfast Free Library
For hyper local eel fans and the eel-curious...we'll be presenting excerpts from The Elversphere at the Belfast Free Library on Thursday, October 16, at 6:30 p.m., in the Abbott Room (106 High St., Belfast). We'll share how we became fascinated with eels and highlights of our explorations to date. There will also be a Q& A. Attendees are welcome to share their own eel stories.
This event is co-sponsored by Belfast Bay Watershed Coalition and Shannaghe Artist Residency.
SCIENCE/POLICY SHARE
Advances in gene sequencing are a part of the eel story. Environmental DNA or "eDNA" sampling uses traces of genetic material present in a particular water body to identify whether eels are present. DNA barcoding matches samples of eels (or other species) at market to a database of species-identifying DNA snippets. This is a way to tell whether an eel is an American, European, or Japanese eel (or none of the above), and can aid enforcement of trade and conservation regulations.
Kenzo Kaifu
This study (Kaifu, et al., Nature, 2025) is an example of DNA barcoding use in research.
EELS IN THE MEDIA
We may be experiencing an eel renaissance. A "ren-eel-aissance" if you will. Below are some eel-related projects* we've come across recently.
*Mentions are not necessarily endorsements. Do you have an opinion on something here in The Elversphere? Leave a comment below or send us an email.
Hidden Dance of Eels (2024)
Eli recently crossed paths with a Dutch visitor (hallo Berend!), who comes from a family of eel fishermen and producers of smoked eel. Berend mentioned a recent doc film written & directed by Hans Dortmans, Hidden Dance of Eels, which we look forward to watching.
The Glass Eel by J.J. Viertel
The headline for a recent review of new novel The Glass Eel in the Portland Press Herald reads "Maine's black market for baby eels is spawning a crime-thriller subgenre." Eel trafficking is no joke but it's just one small part of the eel story ecosystem.
Thank you for reading the first edition of The Elversphere newsletter!
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