The northern scup—here on Long Island, we just call them “porgies”—isn’t
a big fish.
The International Game Fish Association, which keeps track
of the biggest fish caught by anglers, recognizes a 4-pound, 9-ounce scup as
the all-tackle world record, and it’s unlikely that they get too much larger than that.
Scup have a pretty small mouth, and no teeth to speak of,
but to hear some folks tell it, they’re the scourge of the seas.
That became pretty obvious a week or so ago, when the
Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council released the summary of the most recentSummer Flounder, Scup and Black Sea Bass Advisory Panel meeting, where Marc
Hoffman, a recreational fisherman from New York said
“All those scup are eating lobster roe, small crabs,
shellfish, and baby flounder…When one species grows so much, it’s going to wipe
out some other species…”
Hoffman made similar comments about black sea bass, a
somewhat larger species often caught along with scup, that on rare occasions
can grow to nine pounds or so. In that
case, he said that
“They’re wiping out other species. If we don’t act soon, you’re going to lose
the lobster fishery throughout the northeast.
We need an emergency opening of both the commercial and recreational
black sea bass fishery…”
And he made the impassioned plea
“Sea bass and scup are growing enormously and need to be
contained to a reasonable amount. You
can’t allow one species to devour everything else.”
His last sentence may have even had value if, when he said “one
species” he had Homo sapiens in mind…
But it’s pretty likely that Hoffman wasn’t thinking that way
when he said what he did, but rather envisioned some maritime Armageddon that
saw a horde of fish perhaps the size of your foot running rampant and scouring
life from the seas.
The sort of event that
might give rise to a movie such as “Scupnado: This time, it’s even harder to believe…”
Still, Hoffman’s comments weren’t all that unusual when
folks are trying to stave off conservation efforts or even increase their
kill. At the Advisory Panel meeting,
Michael Ireland, a North Carolina commercial fisherman, said that
“Sea bass are eating scallops, lobster, everything,”
and reported that
“I recently had a huge tow of scup and some of them got
damaged while we were bringing them aboard.
We discovered they were eating small scallops. There were 10-12 scallops in each fish. When you think about how many scup are out
there, that’s a big impact on other species…”
Yep, maybe even “Scupnado
II: The Sixth Extinction.”
But, no, our kind already has that one well underway.
And you have to wonder about how scallops ever survived for
a few million years before we came along to “protect” them…
Yet the “Scupnado”
scenario is just the lastest in a long series of claims that fish have to be
killed off lest they somehow unbalance the ecosystem.
Spiny dogfish are a perennial whipping boy for anglers who
want to blame predators—rather than fishing mortality—for the decline of
various species, including summer flounder.
A recent article in The Fisherman magazine claimed
“…one might reasonably assume that stringent preservation of
other predatory species like spiny dogfish and black sea bass—an imbalanced
effort to create preservation and abundance—could significantly impact the
amount of young fluke. While local
commercial fishermen are once again allowed to harvest spiny dogs, the
environmentalists’ [sic] who forced the closure of this fishery a decade ago
ultimately destroyed that market, creating an overabundance of fluke-hungry sea
wolves.”
Last October, as the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries
Commission was debating a reduction in striped bass landings, the same argument
was made in a different form, with one member of its Striped Bass Management
Board, Russell Dize, legislative proxy from Maryland, arguing that increasingthe abundance of striped bass wasn’t necessary because
“I’ve been a commercial fishermen for 55 years in
Maryland. I’ve watched the striped bass
come and go. At this time, we’ve
probably got more striped bass in the bay than I’ve ever seen in my life. We’ve got so many striped bass that it has
affected our crab-catching industry. We
are probably down to a low ebb last summer on crabs.
“One of the predators is rockfish, striped bass. When the charterboats catch the striped bass
and they clean them, you can count anywhere from ten to forty small crabs in
the belly of a rockfish…”
Of course, such arguments aren’t limited to the East
Coast. They occur anywhere and
everywhere people want to kill more fish than the law will allow.
Down in the Gulf of Mexico, where red snapper are about
halfway through a long rebuilding effort, we’re told by Alabama charter boatcaptain Dale Woodruff that
“[T]here’s way too many Red Snapper out there, we’ve got to
go thin the heard [sic] out.”
That follows comments by anglers and charter boat captains
that red snapper are, well, snapping up everything on the reef, driving down
the population of everything from beeliners to gray triggerfish.
But the most outrageous case of blaming one fish for the
decline in other fish stocks probably came in the form of comments made by a
major industrial fish catcher/processer opposing proposed language that would provide greater
protection for forage fish in the National Standard One guidelines.
The National Standards are provisions of the
Magnuson-Stevens Act that establish the framework for how the law should be
applied, and the guidelines applied to such National Standards are intended to inform
regional fishery management councils that must prepare fishery management plans
that conform to the law.
It was proposed that forage fish be managed more
conservatively than species at higher trophic levels, to better assure that
their role in the food web, as well as their mere sustainability, could be
maintained.
But the catcher/processer in question challenged that
assumption arguing, among other things, that an abundance of forage fish,
intended to provide food for predator species such as cod and haddock, could
actually cause a decline in such species by eating their larvae and eggs.
Such argument isn’t without some support; in the North Sea,
where cod and other groundfish have been overfished for many years, there is
data suggesting that an abundance of herring can inhibit the groundfishes’
recovery.
However, that problem only arose because groundfish
populations had been so badly overfished that they were vulnerable to the
forage fish’s predation. Had groundfish
been properly managed, an abundance of herring would only be a boon, not a
potential obstruction, to their sustainability.
It was a perfect example of blaming the fish for a problem
that fishermen first engendered.
So it is with all of the claims that the abundance of one
stock of fish can only harm the health of another. Fish of all species thrived at unfished
levels of abundance for untold thousands—often millions—of years without
causing harm to one another.
It was only after unregulated harvest threw the ecosystem
out of whack that some problems seemed to appear.
Thus, we must realize that the answer to any such problems
isn’t to fish all species down to some level of scarcity.
Rather, it is to increase the abundance of depleted
stocks, through restrictions on harvest when needed, to restore the balance
once more.
No comments:
Post a Comment