In Taiwan’s waters, a hunt for tiny, wriggling ‘gold’

YILAN COUNTY, Taiwan – The hunters waded into the water after darkish, their headlamps beaming as they tossed nets into the crashing waves again and again.

All night time, they shook muck from the nets, finding out their prizes: wriggling, clear child eels, every no thicker than a vermicelli noodle. They have been value their weight in gold, or almost. The fishermen dropped them into jars of water, which a few of them hung round their necks on string.

“Typically it’s gold, typically it’s filth,” mentioned Dai Chia-sheng, who for a decade had spent his winters fishing for glass eels, because the child eels are referred to as. Introduced in by the ocean currents yearly, the eels had lured households like Dai’s to Taiwan’s coasts for generations.