BY TOM BELL

MaineToday Media, Inc.

A new fishery has emerged in Maine: the slime eel, one of the sea's oldest and oddest creatures.

Several boats in Portland and the Washington County town of Milbridge have begun fishing for the deep-water creatures, which are shipped to Korea so their skin can be made into wallets.

The fishery is unregulated, and scientists don't know much about the slime eel or how much fishing pressure the stocks can withstand. Some people worry overfishing could lead to a crash, a fate that previously befell sea urchins, an unregulated fishery that went from boom to bust in the 1990s.

The owners of processing companies in Portland and Milbridge, though, say that won't happen with slime eels because they are so disgusting that only a limited number of people will have anything to do with them.

"It's a very hard job. Nobody likes it," said Bien Thach, 42, an immigrant from Vietnam who owns Rainbow Seafood Inc., a two-year-old business on Portland's Hobson's Wharf.

On Thursday, Thach was supervising four people at they sorted the fish and cleaned off the mucus-like slime the eels secrete from 240 ducts lining their pink bodies.

Scientists say the slime appears to serve two purposes: It makes them so slippery predators can't grab a hold of them. Also, the slime causes the unfortunate fish trying to eat it to gag or even suffocate.

Slime eels also produce a stench that is so strong people unaccustomed to the smell can find it difficult to bear.

"That smells like death," said Allie Stevens, a waitress working Becky's Diner, who was asked by a reporter to step into the processing room for a minute. She seemed physically sickened by the experience.

The slime eel is not a true eel because it lacks a jaw.

It is primitive; all the vertebrates that slithered some 300 million years ago are now extinct, except for the slime eel and the lamprey. Their closest relatives are fossils.

Slime eels, also know as hagfish, spend most of their time burrowing in the muddy bottom in the deep ocean.

They mostly eat invertebrates, such as shrimp, but they also slip into the mouths, gills and other openings of dead and dying fish to eat them from the inside out.

They are a nuisance to gill-net fishermen because they eat the fish in the nets, said John Williamson, a former fishermen who now works for Ocean Conservancy in Portland. "When you haul back the net, all you have is skins and bones."

Slime eels can devour a 40-pound tuna in 10 minutes, said Stacia Sower, a scientists at the University of New Hampshire who has studied slime eels since 1980.

Fishermen catch slime eels using traps that sit on the ocean bottom and are strung together, much like lobster traps.

The traps are 50-gallon plastic pickle barrels filled with herring or mackerel bait and weighted down with a concrete block.

The eels crawl down funnels and are unable to escape. The small ones, which have little market value, escape though holes that have been drilled all over the surface of the barrel.

Every five days or so, fishermen haul the barrels up, empty the fish on deck, re-fill the barrels with bait and drop them down. On deck, the fishermen wash slime overboard.

At Hobson's Wharf recently, the Morning Star, a 77-foot dragger, came in with its hold filled with slime eels.

The vessel and its four-man crew fish 250 barrels at a time, said the ship's captain, David Ames, 47, who recently moved from Gloucester, Mass., to Portland.

He said he's now fishing about 90 miles off shore.

He said he likes the fishery because the price he gets for the fish -- 50 cents a pound -- is stable, unlike groundfish.

Hansen Chau, 45, of Westbrook, also is fishing for slime eels this year, using an 85-foot dragger, the Meridian, which he bought for $130,000.

So far, he's been able to make his loan payments, but there's not much profit because of the high cost of fuel, he said.

In addition to the two big vessels, two small lobster boats are also fishing for slime eels this year, Thach said.

Thach, who also dives for sea urchins, said his company employs 17 part-time workers to clean, sort and pack the fish, which are frozen and shipped to Korea.

The workers are immigrants from Vietnam and Cambodia. They don't speak much English and have few options for work, he said.

In Milbridge, Cherry Point Products fishes for slime eels using five boats in the 44- to 46-foot range. The company plans to start fishing for eels on July 1, when the season for sea cucumber ends.

The company employs 25 people, not counting the fishermen, said Drusilla Ray, who own the business with her husband, Lawrence Ray.

She said this will be her third season in the fishery. It fills a gap in the fishing year.

"You got people here," she said. "You need to provide work for them."

Fishermen in Gloucester have been taking sea eels since the early 1990s, after it was discovered the ones in the Gulf of Maine produce a better-quality skin than those on the West Coast. A few years ago, Gloucester was considered the world's largest exporter of the fish.

While the fishery in Gloucester has been fairly stable, the effort has moved farther offshore, said Teri Frady, a spokesperson for the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The most recent available data on landings are from 2005, when U.S. fishermen landed 800 metric tons.

A Gloucester fisherman in 2002 asked the New England Fishery Management Council to regulate the species, but the council did not take action.

Last year, the Fisheries Service for the first time required dealers to get a federal permit to handle slime eels and vessels to carry observers, if requested, to gather more data on the fishery.

Compared to other fish, female slime eels produce relatively few eggs -- only 20 to 25 eggs at time. Sower, the UNH scientist, said she's worried overfishing could wipe out stocks quickly, something that has already occurred in Asia.

The fish play an important ecological role, she said, by feeding on the dead and recycling nutrients. Without slime eels, those nutrients might be wasted.

"They keep everything moving in the ocean, so to speak," she said.

Even though its a relatively small and low-value fishery, it should have its own management plan, just like more glamorous species, said Williamson, of the Ocean Conservancy.

Ray, however, said she doesn't see the need for regulators to step in.

"I don't have the feeling that it's an industry that a lot of people want to get into," she said.