SALTWATER FISHING: WHEN IS IT TIME TO STOP TAKING, AND START GIVING BACK?

 

Fishing regulations are, or at least should be, rooted firmly in science, and tempered by social and economic considerations only to the extent that the science allows.  Ethical issues should be left up to philosophers, poets, and the temper of the times.

But the temper of the times does not shape itself.  It is shaped by events, and the impacts of those events upon people, and upon society as a whole.  John Donne, an early 17^th Century English poet, once wrote

“No man is an island,

entire of itself;

every man is a piece of the continent,

a part of the main…”

While Donne penned those words to champion the relationship of people to each other, they work just as well to remind us that our actions cannot be viewed in a vacuum; even the smallest thing that we do has implications that touch others.

In a fisheries context, perhaps Donne could have written “No man is an island…every man is a piece of the ecosystem,” as everything we do impacts the web of life in which we, too, reside.

Thus, it’s not enough to say that we follow the law when we go fishing, and only take so many fish as the law allows.  Nor should we heed the oft-heard injunction to “Mind your own business” and pay no attention to the fish that others are taking.  Because in the end, both they and we are part of the same ecosystem, making the fish that others remove from the water, legally or otherwise, necessarily our business, too.

We also must always remember that “legal” is not the moral equivalent of “right,” and that the law often trails ethics by quite a few years.

In my lifetime, I’ve seen the ethics of saltwater angling transform.

When I was young, in the late 1950s, ‘60s and early ‘70s, there were very few regulations governing salt water angling; where I lived, in Connecticut, there was a 16-inch minimum size for striped bass and nothing else.  Most decisions were up to the angler.

So boats came back to dock with garbage cans filled up with bluefish, the anglers asking “Who wants some fish?” even before the boat’s lines were secured.  Fishermen kept winter flounder smaller than the palms of their hands, arguing that “the sweet little ones” made the best eating.  Freezers were cleaned out every spring, when piles of freezer-burned fish made their annual migration to the local landfill.

Elsewhere, many marlin, sailfish, tarpon and even bonefish were caught, killed, and hung up for photos, then tossed back into the sea the following day.  Sharks were also regularly killed and dumped; I recall, even as late as the mid-1980s, going to shark fishing lecture, and hearing the speaker explain how to best dispose of a tiger shark after it was weighed.  “Remember to slit the belly open,” he said, “and get rid of the liver so that it doesn’t float.”

Things have changed a lot since then, but they probably wouldn’t have if anglers had all minded their business, ignored others’ excesses, and made no effort to alter the angling ethos.

Probably nothing in my lifetime changed angler attitudes as much as the striped bass collapse of the late 1970s and early 1980s.  Prior to that event, anglers typically ended a successful trip with anywhere from two to two dozen big striped bass in the boat, fish that were often sold the next morning.  Even in my native Connecticut, where such sale was illegal, the majority of the most skillful anglers lined up at the back doors of seafood restaurants and fish markets to offload their catch for cash.

But after the bass collapsed, and anglers realized what they could easily lose, a conservation ethic pervaded many serious striped bass fishermen.  While there are still too many unreformed striped bass anglers out there, people too ignorant, too self-centered or just plain too stupid to understand how their actions can impact the stock, the temper of the times has changed, and conservation has become integrated into the ethos of the striped bass fishery.

We’ve seen the same sort of sea change with fisheries for sharks, billfish, tarpon and such.  While kill tournaments still exist, and a few fish still die for photos, the old “weigh ‘em then dump ‘em” mentality has, by and large, faded away.

That, too, is largely because thoughtful anglers spoke out, and began to condemn those who wasted and abused the resource.  For fishing is, for most anglers, a social activity.  If showing off a good catch wins them accolades, anglers kill fish and weigh them, and have their pictures pinned up on the tackle shop wall; if such behavior only earns them disdain, they’ll take some fish for food, and release the rest, because there is no longer any emotional reward for doing otherwise.

Yet, while dead fish aren’t earning the accolades that they received in the past, too many anglers are unintentionally killing fish of various species that they mishandle and keep out of the water for far too long, in order to obtain Instagram-worthy snapshots.

While no species is immune to such behavior, surf-caught sharks are probably the biggest victims.  They are regularly dragged out on the beach, where the weight of their entire body bears down on their unsupported vital organs.  At that point, the angler will typically straddle the beached fish’s back, grab it by the snout, and bend its head backward, forcing the spine into an unnatural angle to show the world what they already know:  Sharks have teeth.

So it’s probably past time to give photos of ill-handled fish the treatment that they deserve.

While this is a blog about fish and fishing, and I’m highlighting anglers’ misdeeds, bad behavior occurs throughout the outdoor community.  It was a couple of articles in the Mountain Journal, which had nothing to do with salt water, that inspired this essay.

The first, written by an off-road bicycle rider, was titled “Why Wilderness Matters More than Your Desire to Take It.”   In that piece, the author said,

“…I felt like it was my right, my social entitlement, to access this public land by bicycle…

“Something changed within regarding how I think about wilderness.  Chalk that up to the perspective offered by the march of time, a view shaped by seeing so many pristine places become so heavily overused.  Whether a tire tread, a hiking boot or cars crammed into a trailhead parking lot, they all bear the same message:  The consequences of our individual actions ripple beyond ourselves and the present moment.”

Change “wilderness” to “a fish,” “overused” to “overfished,” and add a dead fish to the list of human impacts, and the message is just as applicable to those who fish our salt waters as it is to those who bike the slickrock trails outside Moab, Utah.

The other piece was a little more pointed.  In “It’s Time for Outdoor Recreationists no Not Be Just Takers,” author Lesli Allision observed that,

“Too often throughout human history we’ve repeated a pattern, use up one place or resource and move on to the next.  This public investment [in the Great American Outdoor Act, recently signed into law], however, does not obviate the need for greater personal responsibility or the fact that outdoor recreation is fast becoming another form of consumerism generating industrial scale impacts on our environment and on wildlife.

“We are wiping out the last refugia for wildlife, yet there is no talk of limits to human recreation, only talk of expansion.  Even the ‘Leave no Trace’ messaging of old have been trampled under the stampede for more and more public access…

“We have to recognize that conservation and recreation are not one and the same.  The question needs to be asked:  what are recreationists personally giving back relative to the impacts we are generating?”

Those comments, although addressing land use in the western states, are particularly germane to marine fisheries issues.

“Use up one…resource and move on to the next…”

In the course of my life, I’ve seen the focus of local inshore recreational fisheries change from winter flounder, which were once ubiquitous throughout the year, to summer flounder and bluefish, then to the recovered striped bass population, then back to summer flounder after that stock rebuilt, until now, when stripers, blues and summer flounder are all tough to find, and black sea bass are asked to carry the burden. 

Throughout all of those changes, too many anglers, and most of the recreational fishing industry, turned their back on any concept of personal responsibility for the health of fish stocks, and instead fought needed conservation measures, demanding continued or greater “public access,” and more dead fish on the dock.

In the recent past, we saw some of the biggest saltwater angling organizations in the nation, along with the two largest fishing tackle and boating industry trade groups, urging Congress to pass the so-called Modern Fish Act, a bill that, in its original form, would have provided greater access—that is, more dead fish—while at the same time weakening the conservation requirements underlying the federal fishery management system, and putting the future health of fish stocks at risk.

No sign of “giving back” there…

Do anglers or angler-related businesses ever give anything back?

There are some.  There are the anglers who make the time and the effort to attend fishery management meetings, and learn the intricacies of the management system, not to obtain more dead fish—more “access”—for themselves, but to argue for science-based management measures, so that anglers may enjoy healthy populations of fish well into the future.

And there are members of the recreational fishing industry, such as the American Saltwater Guides Association, Captains for Clean Water, and the American Fly Fishing Trade Association, who spend their time and money advocating for the conservation of coastal resources, and not for more “access” today, because they know that the future of their businesses ultimately depends on the future health of our marine fish stocks.

It’s a start, but it’s not enough.

More anglers, and more angling-related businesses, must stop focusing on their “right” to kill fish today, and begin focusing on their responsibility to ensure that enough fish remain for the next generation of anglers to enjoy long into the future.

For you can only move on from one resource to the next for so long.  At some point, there’s nowhere left to go.