It’s weakfish time on Long Island.
They’re supposed to bite when the lilacs bloom. I think that’s probably true, and if it’s not,
it should be, for the same light purple hues that color the lilac are washed
bright on the weakfish’s scales, which glow with an ethereal tone that no simple
flower can match.
The striped bass gets most of the glory, and the fluke the
attention of crowds, but weakfish are truly the iconic fish of Long Island’s
South Shore.
They’re the stars of the
stories from times long ago, when salt water angling was new. Fluke and striped bass were bit players then;
bluefish barely part of the scene. But
weakfish—yellowfin, tiderunner, squeteague—were the darlings of sportsmen who
came to our bays from New York City and beyond, to trickle grass shrimp into
the running tide and await a pull on their lines.
Yet, in more recent years, weakfish have seen hard times.
I never even saw one until I was about fifteen. I had heard of weakfish, or course. My father had caught them when he came back
from the war, but they disappeared a few years later—supposedly because of an
eelgrass blight—and stayed away for a very long time.
Since then, their population has hit highs and lows. If you looked hard enough a few were always
around. At least that was true until ’05
or ’06, when the population went into freefall.
There were a handful of very large weaks around—remnants of a big year
class we had been catching since the mid-1990s—and some young-of-the-years that
showed up when the kids fished for snappers, but other than that, they seemed
gone.
Down at the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the
biologists knew there was trouble. A peer-reviewed
stock assessment, prepared in 2009, found that, by 2007, the
spawning potential of the stock had dropped to a mere 3% (an unfished stock
has a spawning potential of 100%); it had never been found to be lower.
“I see, however, that with a moratorium we double the current
biomass with this projection by 2015, so we doubled the biomass with a natural
mortality rate of 0.65 assumed over that course of time.
“If we have a moratorium we double the biomass and we get
approximately, well, a little over halfway towards our target spawning stock
biomass. If natural mortality decreases
for any good reason, then obviously we will be rebuilding faster than the
projections indicate…
“We have nothing before us except uncertainty. We have speculations, but we have a
projection that came out of the workshop and that has been accepted by the
technical committee. I believe they
participated in developing it. This is
what we have to use. I look forward to
continuing discussions by this board regarding the merits of a moratorium to
get ourselves back on track.
“Otherwise, with the projection we see before us, we stay
crashed through 2020, and that certainly is not an acceptable outcome.”
Those were the words of a professional fisheries
manager.
But when ASMFC’s Weakfish
Management Board met in November 2009, to finally determine how the collapsed
stock should be managed, the non-professionals on the Management Board had a
very different view. In fact, if you
read the
published transcript of that Management Board meeting, you probably want to
shake your head and wonder at the positions the amateurs took, and the comments
that were made.
We can’t put the blame on the general public, who seemed to
understand the gravity of the situation and, by more than a two-to-one ratio, asked
to have a complete moratorium imposed on both the commercial and the
recreational fisheries.
Over all the years that I’ve been involved in fisheries
issues, it seems that most of the fishing public—if they get a fair briefing on
the issues and don’t have to rely on information shaped and filtered by the various
angling rights and industry organizations—will want to do the right thing. We saw that with striped bass—both after the
last collapse and now, as we hope to avert the next one—and we saw it with
weakfish, too.
But the amateur managers at ASMFC, who often have strong
pro-industry sympathies, if not direct ties, see things a little
differently. In his opposition to a
moratorium, Pat Augustine, then governor’s appointee from New York, made the
inadvertently telling comment that
“It’s interesting that with this action that we may take we will again affect the fishermen and will
only play a small role, in my mind, in continuing to lead us toward a full
demise of this specie [sic] of fish. [emphasis added]
“Similar as to winter flounder, where we almost put a
moratorium on winter flounder, we would have been one of two states that would
have done that, which would have put a further hit on both recreational,
commercial and bait and tackle people and marines and so for those supplies.”
Apparently, in at least one manager’s mind, it’s OK to “only
play a small role…in continuing to lead us toward a full demise of” the
weakfish, if by doing so you don’t hurt the incomes of the industry folks.
Personally, I think that the “full demise” of any species
should be avoided, by any means necessary, and that even “[playing] a small
role” in such demise is a bad thing, but that’s just me, and may help to
explain why I’m not an ASMFC commissioner…
Again, remembering Dr. Pierce’s recap of the technical data,
a moratorium was the most likely way to start rebuilding the weakfish
stock. Even so, Tom Fote, another
amateur who serves as governor’s appointee from New Jersey, vehemently opposed
the measure, saying
“So, again, I’m looking at a solution that doesn’t basically
shut down a complete fishery and basically allow the person, if he catches the
weakfish of a lifetime or something like that or the kid on a beach actually
catches a weakfish on that rare occasion, they can go home with one weakfish.
“It’s bad enough they can’t go home with a sea bass, and it
looks like next year in New Jersey they can’t go home with a summer
flounder. At least they’ll have, you
know, one fish to take home, maybe one winter flounder and one weakfish. That’s about your whole catch nowadays. How do you keep an industry going?”
How do you keep an industry going? Maybe by managing fish a little more
cautiously, so that there are enough around that people will want to spend some
time on the water catching them, rather mismanaging them so badly that catching one becomes, to use Tom Fote's words, a "rare occasion."
Because if Pat Augustine’s statement, which seemed to
indicate that it was alright to “only play a small role…toward the full demise”
of the weakfish, so long as the industry doesn’t take a hit, is disconcerting,
Tom Fote’s comment is…well…just wrong.
He apparently believes that folks should be able to catching and keep
weakfish and winter flounder when, at 3% and 8%, of their respective spawning potentials,
they were arguably the two most depleted species swimming in New Jersey’s
waters.
Then he tries to justify that belief by saying that folks should keep them because “they can’t go home
with a sea bass,” when over
580,000 sea bass were taken home in New Jersey that year, or because “next
year in New Jersey they can’t go home with a summer flounder,” although
more than 550,000 New Jersey summer flounder were eventually taken home.
That kind of statement crosses
the line between mere rhetorical puffery and something far more dire.
It is a clear demonstration of the fact that, whatever the
species involved and however badly it is in need of protection, some managers at ASMFC place little emphasis on conserving and rebuilding
depleted stocks. To them, it is more important to kill and take
home whatever remains of such stocks today, rather than to refrain and rebuild the
stocks into something robust and productive tomorrow.
That kind of thinking isn’t just limited to weakfish, and it
isn’t just limited to 2009.
It continues
to this day, as demonstrated by ASMFC’s irrational winter flounder decision
last February.
And it looms in the background every time ASMFC fails to
take needed action on striped bass, and that still-viable stock moves ever
closer to being overfished for the first time in more than twenty years.
With weakfish, we may have gotten just a little lucky. A solid year class—the kind that can pop up
now and then, even from badly depleted stocks, and fisheries managers have used
for years to absolve themselves after making bad decisions—emerged a few years ago, and
is creating some good fishing right now.
But it is only one year class, and whether managers will be
able to keep that year class alive and spawning until additional good year
classes can enter the population is still an unanswered question.
But the bigger question is whether ASMFC will ever get its
act together, and adequately protect not just the odd year class or two, but
the long-term health of our fisheries--or whether it will forever be more
interested in assuring that, no matter how depleted a stock may be, the
folks who catch fish will always be able to kill them and take them home,
with no thought for the future at all.
That is a tough thing for anyone to have to suffer through. But at least you've managed to secure your catches. Those could be few and far between for some people, but the fact that you've been able to procure that kind of parasite is really something. Take care!
ReplyDeleteRyan Gruenholz @ Islamorada Fishing Source
This post will definitely inspire a lot of fishermen out there. Being an advocate for the conservation of America’s fisheries is a real noble act. I admire those people who really try to maintain their tradition in rearing fish. Anyway, thanks for sharing this post with us, Charles.
ReplyDeleteDarren Lanphere @ Mirr Ranch Group