I almost swallowed my Trident gum when I stumbled upon a recent news story. It listed the astronomical figure of $1,800 per pound as the market price of a commodity, for which (until recently) most Mainers wouldn’t have paid you a buck a barrel.

I am, of course, referring to elvers.

Having had the good fortune of growing up on the Maine coast, I know something about elvers.

I have fond childhood memories of warm spring evenings spent scooping alewives (and unintentionally the occasional pound of elvers) by hand, from the swiftly moving, brackish stream that runs beneath Route 27. The stream connects a tidal estuary on the seaward side to the southern shore of West Harbor Pond.

Are you not up to speed on these slippery investment-grade aquatic Krugerrands? According to that fount of crowd-sourced wisdom, Wikipedia, elvers, a.k.a. glass eels, are an early stage version of Anguilla rostrata “… a facultative catadromous fish found on the East Coast of North America.”

But you already knew that much, right? Actually, maybe you did.

It turns out that catadromous is just a fancy way of saying that elvers migrate from freshwater to saltwater when they’re all “het up” and ready to get out into the big ocean and spawn.

Come to think of it, that sort of behavior is popular with a number of species found in Maine.

These tiny transparent baby eels, (a “whopper” elver would be around 3.5 inches) are just the latest in a long line of culinary rarities to be discovered and harvested on the Maine coast.

Like sea urchins, mussels, periwinkles and similar critters, elvers, for reasons far beyond my comprehension, are a highly prized gastronomic delicacy in certain far-flung corners of the globe. I know. Go figure, right?

Having personally encountered vast numbers of elvers (not that difficult given that momma eels give birth to about four million offspring annually) I must confess that it has never occurred to me to chow down on a mess of them baked, boiled, broiled, fried or (ewww!) raw, which is apparently the method preferred by true elver lovers.

But, maybe that’s just me. Frankly, I feel pretty much the same way about smelts.

On the other hand, who in their right mind is going to argue with someone offering $1,800 a pound for baby eels, several million of which are at this very moment no doubt swimming around in some random inlet a mile or so from your front porch? And though locals have precious little interest in eating the critters, the cash infusion from the annual elver harvest certainly helps put food on the table for a lot of Maine families. And like I said, this is nothing new. We’ve seen this movie before.

If fact, when I was growing up, every school kid in Maine was taught that back in colonial times, lobsters were so plentiful that they could be found washed up on the shore in huge drifts following a storm. “Old timers” back then told colorful, highly improbable sounding tales about lobsters being so common folks used them for fertilizer.

Summer visitors paying premium prices for “shore dinners” in Maine’s upscale restaurants would be shocked to discover that a couple hundred years ago eating lobsters was considered a sign of poverty and associated with indentured servitude.

According to The Lobster Institute, servants in one village in the early Massachusetts Colony eventually got “fed up” with the situation and successfully petitioned the local magistrate for a legal writ guaranteeing they’d not be fed lobster more than thrice weekly.

If you think about it realistically how hungry would you have to be to encounter a lobster crawling along a rocky ledge and think; “Hmm, I bet if I threw that thing in a pot full of boiling water for 20 minutes or so it’d make a tasty dinner?”

All of which brings me to the following question. If elvers are only the latest in a long line of weird Maine seafood specialties that somebody, someplace is willing to swap great bags of cash for, what’s next on the list?

Based on past experience I’d say that whoever figures that one out stands a better than average chance of becoming a millionaire. It’s worth thinking about, don’t you agree? What’s it gonna be? Sea slugs? Barnacles?

Given the abundant variety of marine life in the gulf of Maine, the list is a long one. The only real problem will involve finding someone brave enough to taste test your latest recipe.