"TRASH FISH" FINALLY GETTING THEIR DUE

 

I fish offshore for tuna.

People who don’t do that too often—or don’t do it at all—might think that it’s always exciting when, after what might have been hours of staring at an empty blue ocean, marked only by the boat’s wake and the splashes and wakes of the lures, a line finally pops away from the outrigger and a rod bends down to the weight of a striking fish.

And yes, that sudden call to action is what we all wait for—except for those times when you realize that no line is rolling off the reel’s spool because a false albacore (more properly, “little tunny”) weighing all of eight or ten pounds just grabbed the trailing lure on a squid bar and, unable to make any headway against nearly 30 pounds of drag, is instead arcing across the entire pattern, going over some lines and under a few more, weaving everything together in a knot that will take at least fifteen minutes to clear.

And the worst thing is, after causing all of that trouble, when you finally drag the miscreant fish to the boat, its meat is so strong and bloody that you can’t even eat it, so you toss it over the side to again wreak havoc on the next tuna boat to troll by.

At least, that’s the way it used to be.  On the offshore scene, at least, false albacore were seen a nuisances that got in the way of the tuna bite, perhaps useful for shark bait but not for much else.

But as light-tackle fishing, and saltwater flyfishing, in particular, began to catch on, false albacore began to gain fans as a strong, fast, sometimes picky fish that pulled hard and were fun to fish for.  Particularly as striped bass and bluefish abundance declined, light tackle guides, who served a clientele more interested in sport than in putting fish in the cooler, relied on false albacore for an increasing part of their business.

Suddenly, the false albacore had economic value, and that economic value earned the fish respect.  People even began caring about its welfare.

The problem was, there was very little information for fishery managers to rely on.  The stock had never been assessed, and no one really knew whether it was accurate to talk about a single false albacore stock, or whether there might be multiple stocks on the U.S. East Coast.  Should light-tackle anglers off Nantucket or Montauk or North Carolina care that a new fishery was starting up down in Florida, that saw fishermen netting and selling false albacore as bait for swordfish and grouper?

More recently, we’ve seen the same sort of thing happen with jack crevalle, another strong, hard-fighting fish that was more-or-less labeled “trash” because of its bloody, strong-tasting meat.

I well recall fishing some backwater along the Lee County (Florida) coast, making cast after cast to the mangroves with only a meager return, when the creek exploded into boiling white water as a school of decent-sized jacks blew up a school of baitfish.  I pointed the breaking fish out to my guide, hoping to he’d get us close enough for a cast, but he said, “They’re just jacks,” and continued to maneuver the boat along the bankside vegetation, trying to give us a shot at speckled trout, snook, or red drum, fish that, on their best day, couldn’t outfight a jack, but were given more respect because people would eat them.

Such traditional disdain for jack crevalle makes little sense.  Well-heeled anglers will spend many thousands of dollars—close to $20,000 for some venues—to catch a giant trevally, but many won’t go 50 yards out of their way to hook up with big jack crevalle.  Granted, the trevally grow about three times as large as the jack crevalle (the International Game Fish Association’s all-tackle record for giant trevally is 160 pounds, 7 ounces, while the all-tackle jack crevalle is just 66-2) but otherwise they’re almost the same fish, both belonging to the genus Caranx and both sharing the same wide-bodied build.

And while it may take days of travel by airplane and boat to reach good giant trevally waters where, if you’re lucky, you might get shots at a few fish each day, anglers along the southeast coast of the United States can often find quality action on big jack crevalle within a few minutes of their docks.  Yet one fish is heralded, the other, too often, disdained.

But, as was the case with false albacore, attitudes seem to be changing.  Guides and their clients are finding jack crevalle to be a relatively abundant, hard-fighting gamefish, qualities that rank high with the many light-tackle anglers who prefer to catch and release challenging sportfish, and don’t care about icing fillets.

As is the case with false albacore, not much is known about jack crevalle.  Like false albacore, it is an unregulated species, there has never been a formal stock assessment, and much of its basic biology—things such as natural mortality rates and migration patterns—remains question marks.

But here, too, there is change, and a lot of the credit for that change goes to the American Saltwater Guides Association, an assemblage of guides, tackle shop owners, other marine businesses, and conservation-minded anglers who understand that healthy and abundant fish stocks are good for business.  Two years ago, they pioneered what they now call “The Albie Project,” a cooperative effort with the New England Aquarium to implant false albacore in the Nantucket Sound area with both acoustic and traditional spaghetti tags, in order to better understand the structure of the stock.

False albacore released near Nantucket have already been detected off North Carolina and Florida, suggesting that the entire East Coast population might constitute a single stock.  Other researchers, unaffiliated with the Association, have also begun to take a more serious look at the species; last October, I took out three Stony Brook University researchers, who managed to deploy four acoustic tags.  Three of those fish were later detected by acoustic arrays, and again confirmed that fish from the northeast, in this case New York, travel as far as Florida.

The single-stock hypothesis found further support in genetic research that is also part of the Albie Project.  Samples were taken from fish caught off Montauk, New York, and also from individuals caught off Massachusetts and North Carolina.  When the lead researcher, Steven Bogdanawicz of Cornell University, commented on the study, he noted,

“Important to remember here that we didn’t set out to determine whether fish from NY/MA/NC were different from each other; rather we’re asking ‘If we take a sample of albies from a pretty broad area at about the same time, how many genetic groups do we see?’  Both softwares [used to analyze the false albacores’ DNA] agree that the answer to that is ‘one.’”

The preliminary data, along with the increasing importance of false albacore to the recreational fishing industry, has led to efforts to provide the fish with some protection from overharvest.  While the Guides Association’s efforts to convince the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council to initiate a fishery management plan for false albacore failed, the Association did convince the Council to have its Mackerel and Cobia Advisory Panel produce fishery performance reports for the species every three years, tracking landings and catch estimates to hopefully determine whether mor formal management might be needed in the future.

In North Carolina, the Guides Association generated enough comment letters to convince the North Carolina Marine Fisheries Commission to adopt basic safeguards for false albacore.  Should landings at any time exceed the five-year average by 200 percent or more, the state will adopt restrictions that will include a 3,500-pound commercial trip limit and a 10-fish individual recreational bag limit, along with a 30-fish recreational boat limit.

Now, the Association is turning its attention to jack crevalle.

In 2023, a paper titled "Rapid approach for assessing an unregulated fishery using a series of data-limited tools” appeared in the American Fisheries Society’s journal, Marine and Coastal Fisheries.  Although it was not a formal assessment of the jack crevalle stock, it used jack crevalle to illustrate an approach to stock assessment.  In doing so, it discovered that

“the Crevalle Jack stock is unmanaged and stock size has continually declined, suggesting that the stock is not being sustainably harvested.  According to the base model [fishing mortality] was above [the fishing mortality rate that would allow harvest at maximum sustainable yield] for 14 of the 22 years since 2000, revealing that overfishing has been occurring regularly since 2000.  Biomass was above [the biomass level needed to produce maximum sustainable yield] from 1950 to 2002 but was below [that level] for every year from 2003 to 2011 and from 2017 to 2021, with [biomass[ being the lowest in 2019.  It appears that high levels of catch above [maximum sustainable yield] starting in 1989 led to overfishing beginning in 2000 and led to the stock becoming overfished in 2003.”

Given such findings, it is important that fishery managers obtain more information about jack crevalle.  In an effort to avert more serious problems, the Guides Association has initiated a tagging program that has guides on Florida’s East Coast implanting spaghetti tags in jack crevalle, in an effort to cast some light on fish distribution, movements, and stock structure.

Thus, former “trash fish” are beginning to get the attention that they deserve, as fishermen, and at least part of the fishing industry, begin to understand that the quality of a fish’s flesh is only one gauge of its value, and that catch-and-release fisheries such as those for false albacore and jack crevalle can generate economic benefits every bit as high, and perhaps even higher, than those emphasizing harvest. 

From there, it is just a short step to understanding that every fish has value, none are mere “trash,” and all should be managed to maintain their abundance at sustainable levels.