THE FEAST OF THE SEVEN (MOSTLY DEPLETED) FISHES

People who aren’t fishermen or divers often spend little time thinking about declining fish populations.  

They might get concerned about the fate of sharks, swordfish or tuna—the sort of “charismatic megafauna” that gets some attention in the mainstream news and often sits front and center in the glossy brochures that accompany conservation groups’ fundraising letters—but outside of that, too many people feel completely disconnected from the ocean, and are unaware of how the health of fish stocks impact their daily lives.

Yet, in one way or another, our lives remain connected to the health of the sea.  So on this Christmas Eve, I thought that it might be appropriate to look at how the fate of fish populations affect people’s lives by looking at how it impacts a holiday tradition:  the Feast of the Seven Fishes.

I come from a Polish Catholic family, and while we always adhered to the traditional injunction against eating meat on Christmas Eve, our fish consumption on that night was limited to creamed, pickled herring to kick off the meal, and only one entrée, which was usually flounder and was always fried (although given the collapse of our badly mismanaged winter flounder stocks, this year’s entrée will be some of the lake trout that my wife and I caught in upstate New York last October).

But for my Italian-American friends, Christmas Eve was a time for a seafood feast.  Some of them stuck to the semi-traditional seven kinds of fish, served in different ways.  Some went far beyond that, buying a dozen or more different kinds, ranging from the same spearing (more properly, “tidewater silversides”) that we used as bait, dipped whole in batter and fried, to sea scallops and lobster.

But there were a few seafood items were served by just about every family that I knew:  Whiting, eels, clams, calamari (squid), baccala (cod), scungilli (whelks), and smelt.  

Half a century later, most of those fish and mollusks are not doing well.

Squid are an exception.  

On the East Coast, the stock of longfin squid, also referred to as “Loligo” (although they’ve now been reclassified as part of the genus Doryteuthis) or “winter” squid, seems to be doing OK.  It’s not overfished, although scientists lack the data they need to determine whether overfishing might be taking place.  The fate of shortfin squid, also known as “Ilex” or “summer” squid, is less certain; while fishery managers don’t believe that overfishing is occurring, they don’t have enough information about the size of the stock to know whether it might be overfished.

Still, no one should feel any guilt about enjoying their calamari.

And maybe no one should be feeling guilt about eating clams, either, because the littlenecks (quahogs, or Mercenaria mercenaria) used in the Clams Casino and Zuppa di Pesce were probably farmed, or at least artificially seeded, although some still come from natural populations.  But in most places, marketable natural populations of quahogs were fished down long ago. 

As a rule, current abundance is inversely related to water quality.  Waters, or bay sediments, that contain too many pollutants for the clams to be safely consumed by people often host large populations of clams; quahogs frequently abound near sewer plant outflows and in murky urban bays.  Some are harvested from such places, and either used to produce “seed clams” that can then be stocked in cleaner waters, others are moved to unpolluted bottom leased by a shellfish company, which will then give the clams time to flush the sewage or other contaminants out of their bodies before selling them as food.

But as far as natural populations go, we’ve gone a long way downhill since the 1970s, when more than half the clams eaten in the United States came from my local waters in Long Island’s Great South Bay.  

The bay’s overall clam population remains depressed, and hopes for restoration lie in the creation of private sanctuaries, such as one created by The Nature Conservancy, where clamming is prohibited and clams spawned there can, in time, reseed the bay bottom.  Yet even those efforts are hampered by the harmful algae bloom known as “brown tide,” which can kill clam spat as well as adult clams, and other water quality issues.

The same sort of declines have been seen in many other historically productive clamming grounds, but the artificial seeding and aquaculture operations have at least kept some clams alive in the bays.

Many fish are having a much harder time.

Although my family didn’t celebrate the Feast of the Seven Fishes, I did spend some time helping friends to gather the fish that they needed.  I still remember one morning when I accompanied one of them to New York’s Fulton Fish Market to buy some eels and whiting.

It was the late 1970s.  The market was still located at the end of Fulton Street in Manhattan, and it was still what federal attorneys referred to as a “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization.”  When we arrived, we parked our car on the street right outside the market, and gave $5 to the guy who came right over to collect it (yes, it was a public street, not a private lot, but if you paid the $5 the folks who sold you the fish could stack it up next to your vehicle and no one would touch it, while if you didn’t pay, the fish would likely be gone, along with your tires and wheels and probably your windshield).  Then we went into the market to buy some nice whiting, along with some eels that were kept, alive, in a truck-mounted tank.  Our mission completed, we purchased a couple of egg sandwiches at a run-down bar/greasy spoon (fried by someone wearing a slightly grimy, sleeveless T-shirt that did nothing to hide the .45 that rode in a shoulder holster beneath his left arm), got into the car, and arrived back in Connecticut—and a very different world—by sunrise.

Whiting and eels were cheap and abundant in those days.  

During the winter, party boats sailed for whiting 24/7, and anglers caught them from piers that lined the New York and New Jersey shorelines.  Eels were everywhere, too.  In the warmer months—say, from mid-April through early December—it was often hard not to catch them while fishing in the bays and marshes for flounder and other fish.  Once the bays froze over, fishermen ventured out on the ice and probed the bay bottoms with “winter spears” that squeezed eels between their tines and snagged them on U-shaped points as the spears were pulled out of the sediment.

These days, things have changed.  The Feds went after the Fulton market, which later moved to The Bronx, and eels are in trouble.  

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission lists eels as “depleted,” and notes that commercial landings have fallen from anywhere between 2.5 and 3.6 million pounds in the 1970s and early 1980s to about 780,000 pounds in 2018.  It also notes that

“The stock is at or near historically low levels due to a combination of historical overfishing, habitat loss, food web alterations, predation, [dam] turbine mortality, environmental changes, toxins and contaminants, and disease,”

and that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service performed a status review to determine whether the American eel should be listed under the Endangered Species Act, before finally deciding that a listing was not needed yet.

Even though no listing was justified, eels are certainly one of the Seven Fishes that is not doing well.

Whiting (correctly called “silver hake”), on the other hand, are neither overfished nor subject to overfishing.  However, the fish have retreated from inshore waters; not only is it impossible to catch one from shore, but the swarms of fish that once supported an outstanding party boat fishery in New York Bight have disappeared.  

In 1981, the first year for which even semi-reliable data is available, anglers in the Mid-Atlantic region (New York through North Carolina) caught a little under 750,000 whiting—and the fishery was already in decline.  By 2019, that catch had fallen to a supposed 500 or so fish, but so few were caught, and encountered by National Marine Fisheries Service surveyors, that such estimate has no statistical validity; given the margin of error, one whiting or one thousand—which nonetheless indicates a shocking decline—are equally valid estimates.

So yes, the whiting stock might still be able to produce maximum sustainable yield on a continuing basis, but it’s not nearly what it was four decades ago.

After whiting, it’s all bad news.

Cod is the whiting’s larger, better known, and far more valuable cousin.  It is in deep trouble in the Northeast.  

For centuries, New England’s waters fed much of the western world, with vessels sailing from Spain, France, England and other European nations to fish there, and carry vast quantities of dried, salted cod--baccala--back to the Old World.  In time, France and England spawned colonies on the North American shore, largely to harvest the cod and other natural resources of what was, despite more than 10,000 years of native occupation, a largely unexploited land.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that cod played a large role in the founding of New England.  A wooden “sacred cod” still hangs in the Massachusetts State House to memorialize the fishery’s importance.  New England still enjoyed large and lucrative cod fisheries into the latter half of the 20^th Century, but those fisheries began collapsing by century’s end. 

Now, they're just about gone.  A recent operational stock assessment shows the Gulf of Maine stock of cod to be both overfished and subject to overfishing, although biomass seems to be increasing as new fish recruit into the population.  The other cod stock, Georges Bank, is also in bad condition, although the current stock assessment model has not established biological reference points that can be used to make a formal declaration of its condition.  Nonetheless, the operational assessment says that such stock is

“recommended to be overfished due to poor stock condition, while recommended overfishing status is unknown.”

Thus, anyone serving cod as one of their Seven Fishes this year probably isn’t providing their guests with the traditional New England staple.  Instead, they’re either serving  Atlantic cod imported from Iceland, where the fish remains abundant and, historically, has been much better managed, or the closely related but far less valued Pacific cod, a fish that does not seem to be experiencing population problems.

But at least Atlantic cod are managed, if not particularly well.  Here in New York, harvest of scungilli—that is, channeled and knobbed whelks, a large marine snail—is subject to almost no regulation.  And the whelk population is suffering as a result.

For many years, such whelks didn’t represent a major fishery.  Lobstermen and crabbers and oystermen took some as bycatch, and there were other fishermen who targeted them when fishing for other species was slow.  But both demand and prices tended to be low for most of the year.  Zuppa di Pesce, whether served at a local seafood restaurant or prepared at home, was generally their higher and best use.  

That changed in recent years, as growing demand—and increasing prices—in the Asian export market, combined with a decline in the availability of other species, such as lobster, have caused whelk landings to spike.

Spiking landings and lax regulation create problems for an animal that is easy to catch and doesn’t mature until it is 9 or 10 years old.  Regional whelk populations have become depleted.  In response, a number of states, including Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, have adopted minimum size regulations intended to allow at least 50 percent of the females to reach maturity before they can be retained.  New York is attempting to adopt similar regulations, and has been trying to do so since 2013, but has not yet overcome the strong resistance of its commercial fishermen, who are focusing on such regulations’ short-term impacts, and ignoring their long-term benefits for the fishery.

Unless that changes, and whelk are managed for long-term abundance, New Yorkers, at least, who celebrate the Feast of the Seven Fishes may soon be importing their scungilli from elsewhere.

Which brings us, finally, to the small and generally unappreciated rainbow smelt.  When I was a boy, they swarmed into Connecticut estuaries beginning in mid-October, stuck around all winter, and ascended coastal streams to spawn in early spring.  They supported a very quirky, and very enjoyable, recreational fishery back then, but in the late 1960s, they disappeared.

That disappearance inspired the very first essay that I wrote for this blog, “When Fisheries Die,” nearly seven years ago, in January 2014. 

It’s not clear why the collapse happened.  Pollution may have played a role.  Their upstream spawning grounds may have been degraded.  Climate change could have made waters too warm, or maybe smelt, like so many other anadromous fish, fell victims to dams that blocked their paths upstream, and prevented them from spawning at all.  Whatever the reason, smelt disappeared from southern New England, and seem to be declining up north as well.  Maine managed to host decent runs for years, but just this morning, I was reading an Internet forum where one Maine poster asked

“[D]oes anyone have any info on this year’s smelt run.  Last couple of years were sure a disappointment as far as numb[ers]…”

He received no positive answers, so maybe Maine isn’t seeing many smelt any more, either.  It’s been a while since I’ve seen smelt in a store, so I’m not even sure that it’s possible to serve them at a Feast of the Seven Fishes anymore.

And that’s too bad.  It’s unfortunate that not just smelt, but so many of the other fish that have been a traditional part of Christmas Even dinners are in decline.  

Certainly, they can be replaced by other things, but somehow a Feast made up of imported tilapia, farmed Arctic char, farmed shrimp, farmed branzino and some of the infamous Vietnamese catfish, perhaps accompanied by some honest local squid and an aquacultured shellfish or two, doesn’t sound anywhere near as appealing as the Christmas Eve dinners that my friends talked about years ago.

Traditions matter, and if people care enough, they don’t have to settle for a Christmas Eve marred by the antibiotic- and hormone-laced products of coastal fish farms. 

If they demand that all United States fisheries, and not just those governed by the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, are sustainably managed, that overfishing of all species ends, and that all overfished stocks are promptly rebuilt, then they might be able to enjoy a Feast of the Seven (Wild and Well-managed) Fishes once again.