The only restrictions on this industry are that diggers cannot use any form of mechanical harvest or work on Sundays. As of May 2019, most shops will pay $0.35 per bloodworm and $0.18 to $0.20 per sandworm, with shops further from the East Coast markets in Boston and New York paying less per worm to offset the additional costs of transporting these worms.Īs an open fishery, there are no restrictions on license sales, and anyone can enter the industry by purchasing a license from the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR). For sandworms, landings from 2014–2018 ranged from 195,608 lbs to 222,379 lbs with a value from $1,430,051 to $1,595,069, about 20 percent of peak landings (Maine DMR, 2019).Ĭombining the two species, the marine worm fishery is the fifth most valuable fishery in Maine, following the lobster, elver, Atlantic herring, and soft-shell clam fisheries (Maine DMR, 2019). For bloodworms, landings from 2014–2018 ranged from 376,294 lbs to 447,767 lbs with a value from $6,043,949 to $6,585,071, about 50 percent of peak landings for the fishery in the 1970s (Maine DMR, 2019). This number has fallen from 2009, when the industry employed 1,100 diggers (Sypitkowski et al., 2009). In 2019, there were around 800 active worm harvesters in Maine (Maine DMR, 2019). Diggers typically specialize in digging either bloodworms or sandworms, but some diggers do switch species depending on market influences.
In this fishery, worm harvesters-also called wormers or diggers-work during low tide to harvest marine worms from the extensive mudflats along Maine’s coastline.
Much like when the fishery started a century ago, the contemporary marine worm fishery still focuses on two species, bloodworms ( Glycera dibranchiata) and sandworms ( Alitta virens). Two sandworm diggers in the same crew working in Mount Desert Narrows.
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