About twenty minutes from my house, there’s a spring creek
that’s very popular with the flyfishing crowd.
It flows through a state park, and is loaded with trout.
In the river’s heyday, the park’s phone lines were flooded by calls from
anglers trying to reserve fishing time. February and March were
catch-and-release months. I remember spending nights in my truck, as my breath
iced the windshield, so that I would be near the front of the line when the
“beats” were handed out; everyone’s goal was to get a choice beat where big and supposedly “sea run” rainbow trout
might be caught on a fly.
The only “sea run” that I ever
caught there was, at best, ten inches long, but it was indeed bright and
silver, signs that it had spent at least part of the winter close to Great
South Bay.
I’m not sure that the river held
any true “sea runs.” It did have a hatchery that pumped out plenty of trout,
more than the river could have produced on its own, and some of them did drop
down into the tidal section of the stream. If the folks who tossed worms and
killifish into the culvert that flowed under Sunrise Highway didn’t get them, a
few of those wandering trout returned to the freshwater part of the river, but
calling them “sea runs,” in the way a Pacific
steelhead is “sea run,” was probably pushing the point.
In any event, a few years ago
everything changed. Infectious pancreatic necrosis, a disease which often
occurs in hatchery situations, was found on the premises, and the state shut
the fishery down. Anglers were encouraged to take all of the fish from the
stream, to prevent the disease from spreading. The big “sea runs” didn’t run
anymore.
In time, the hatchery was updated, fish were put back into the
stream. The fishermen returned, and are again writing rapturous prose about the
river on websites and in local magazines. But things have changed. Now, the
fishing season never closes. Anglers still need to reserve their beats, but
there is a lot less competition than there had been before. And you don’t hear
as much about “sea runs” these days, although there are plenty of good-sized
rainbows up in the hatchery that, when their breeding days are done, will be
released into the river and, if they travel into salt water, may get their 15
minutes of “sea run” fame.
But one thing remains the same as it was years ago. If you walk
up the river to the hatchery pools, you can still find vending machines full of
fish food that you can buy and feed to the trout, just like feeding goldfish,
before they’re let loose in the stream.
And that’s why I rarely fish in that river these days. I imagine
some poor trout in the hatchery pool. One day, it’s swimming around under nets
that shelter it from herons and circling ospreys, getting fat on handfuls of
food pellets purchased and tossed into its tank by passing children. Then, the
next day, that once-coddled fish is forced out of its safe and cozy home and
into the stream, where the same sort of people who once fed it tasty pellets
are now poking holes in its face and dragging it into the hostile air, the same
air where the ospreys and eagles and great blue herons fly, searching for
innocent, domestic trout in the river below.
It’s not that I’m concerned for
the rainbows themselves. They’re the epitome of what angler/author Ted Williams calls “rubber trout,”fish
that are “tame, sallow, inbred imitations mass-produced in hatcheries;” they
are what another author, Anders Halverson, described as “an entirely synthetic fish” that
various government agencies have spread across the world, often to the great
detriment of native fish populations. Their deaths would probably improve the
river, if not the park’s revenues.
What I’m most concerned with is the impact of such fish on
myself as an angler, and on my relationship with the real and natural world.
I’m a saltwater fisherman, and I’m not particularly interested
in catching rubber trout or rubber anything else. Since I caught my first fish
at the age of two, I’ve pursued creatures spawned in the wild, survivors that
always caught their own food while avoiding becoming food for one of the myriad
of predators that shared the same sea. The fish that I seek have been
strengthened by current, waves and tide, and tempered by the changing seasons.
They are strong, beautiful, wild animals that are worth seeking and, in this
increasingly perilous world, worth conserving and protecting.
But in some places, salt water fish aren’t as wild as they used
to be. Some states are turning to hatcheries to artificially maintain the
abundance of fish in coastal waters, rather than imposing the more restrictive
management measures needed to maintain naturally-reproducing populations.
It’s probably no coincidence that
the Coastal Conservation Association, one of the organizations leading the
fight to weaken the conservation and management provisions of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (Magnuson-Stevens), is a strong supporter of
saltwater fish hatcheries, or that most of the support for such
hatcheries comes from the Gulf of Mexico region, where Magnuson-Stevens and its
science-based management measures are generally held in disdain.
As the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department notes, hatchery
fish are stocked along the coast to “ensure that harvest levels are sustained.”
Without the expedient of stocking, managers would have to reduce harvest levels
in order to maintain the abundance of naturally-spawned fish; that would make
anglers unhappy.
Thus, throughout the Gulf,
hatchery programs are being viewed as an alternative that alleviates the need
for controversial harvest restrictions. Karl Wickstrom, editor of Florida Sportsman magazine and a harsh critic of federal fisheries
management, has argued that “a well-run hatchery program can
provide additional fish for recreational angling, bringing important
socio-economic returns for the public…Researchers say it’s no coincidence that
Texas has a red drum bag limit (3) that’s triple the number in Florida. In fact,
the late Texas science director Larry McEachron said there’s no doubt in his
mind that if Texas didn’t have its hatcheries, it would need to have a one-fish
limit as in Florida.”
In Mississippi, state officials
have already taken the first steps toward what could be the ultimate end run
around unpopular fishery rules—stocking hatchery-reared red snapper.
Still, the notion of salt water
hatcheries has its critics. Alec D. MacCall, a senior scientist with the National Marine
Fisheries Service, observed that there is no evidence that
hatcheries have ever helped any saltwater fish population rebuild. He noted,
“The real fundamental problem is fishery reform…If a hatchery effectively stops
management reform for the natural stock, I’d be hesitant to call anything
successful.”
That’s a key point, for the
existence of hatcheries evidences nothing more than the failure of fisheries
management. We can see evidence of that failure across the country. In
Pennsylvania, native brook trout have been displaced by brown trout stocked
in the state’s limestone streams. In Colorado and Wyoming, in turn, stocked brook trout threaten native cutthroat populations.
After a century or more of hatchery dependence, freshwater fishery managers are
beginning to rethink stocked trout’s role.
Montana, despite its dependence
on angling-related tourism, stopped stocking trout in its rivers and streams about
forty years ago, and concentrated on conserving and rebuilding its wild fish
populations.
Pennsylvania still stocks, but not in its premier rivers,
the “Class A Wild Trout Water” where wild fish reproduce naturally and
are protected by appropriate regulation. In Quebec, scientists found that
stocking lake trout in waters that hold wild fish compromises the genetic integrity of the native lake trout
populations.
Saltwater fishery managers don’t yet have to deal with such
problems. That’s why Magnuson-Stevens is such an important law; it requires
managers to conserve and rebuild wild fish stocks, and not fall back on the
expedient of hatchery production.
Thus, salt water anglers don’t have to encounter “rubber” red
snapper or “entirely synthetic” summer flounder when they’re on the water.
Strong, wild fish still fill our coastal seas.
Hopefully, thanks to Magnuson-Stevens, that will always be so.
------
This essay, along with the photos, first appeared in “From the
Waterfront,” the blog of the Marine Fish Conservation Network, which can be
found at http://conservefish.org/blog/
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