THE FORGOTTEN FISHES

 

At the September meeting of New York’s Marine Resources Advisory Council, the members present requested that the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation consider adopting regulations governing the commercial and recreational fisheries for northern puffer, the creature better known simply as “blowfish.”

The DEC agreed to take a look at the matter and come up with some possible rules although, given the agency’s limited authority to manage marine species, it might take an act of the state legislature before any such regulations may be put in place.

Even so, the Advisory Council’s request, and the DEC’s response, were significant.

Regular readers of this blog know that just a few species of fish get most of the attention.  Striped bass probably lead the pack, closely followed by red snapper and black sea bass, with river herring, Atlantic cod, bluefish, various flounders, and shortfin makos trailing well behind.  Some other fishes make cameo appearances, but there are many, many more that don’t get any attention at all.

Fishery management works about the same way.

While fishery management plans may include many diverse species—the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s Snapper-Grouper Fishery Management Plan encompasses 55 different fishes—only a relative handful of those species receive the lion’s share of managers’ attention and resources.  While species such as summer flounder and striped bass, which are important to both the recreational and commercial fisheries, might be assessed on a regular basis, other fish, such as blowfish or northern kingfish, may not be assessed, or even managed, at all.

That’s not a good thing, and it can seem unduly dismissive of the such fishes' role in both the ecosystem and in local fisheries, but in a world where the resources committed to fisheries science and management are far less than the task requires, there will always be species that command less attention than others.  The striped bass, cod, and red snapper will always be better-researched, and probably better managed, than the cunner, tomcod, and windowpane.

Still, every now and then one of the forgotten fish manages to get its day in the sun.  Here in New York, a few decades ago, that happened to the humble oyster toadfish.  Long reviled as a slimy nuisance by anglers, and generally ignored as unmarketable by commercial fishermen, the toadfish suddenly drew the attention of buyers in urban live-fish markets, where it became popular with some folks who were recently arrived in the United States.

Crabbers and potters in New York’s bays suddenly found themselves in a rare situation, able to make good money catching an abundant and completely unregulated species of fish.  The boom times went on for a while, but it wasn’t too long before toadfish numbers, particularly the numbers of big toadfish that brought the best price, went into noticeable decline.  And since toadfish are part of a reasonably complex bay ecosystem, that’s not all that happened; when toadfish numbers declined, the numbers of small crabs, which had composed a big part of the toadfish’s diet, began to spike.

Crabs are important predators of shellfish, particularly clams, and it doesn’t make any difference to them whether the clams that they feed on derived from natural sets, whether they were seeded by local hatcheries trying to supplement overfished beds, or whether they were planted by the new aquaculture operations that were beginning to appear along New York’s shores.  So it didn’t take very long for folks in the shellfish industry to contact the DEC, and demand that they do something to protect the toadfish, before the crabs ate them out of house and home.

The state responded with what may be the only oyster toadfish regulations on the East Coast, with anglers limited to a 3-fish bag, 10-inch minimum size, and a season that’s closed between May 15 and July 15, to protect fish during their spawn, while commercial fishermen share the same season and size limit, but may retain up to 25 toadfish per day.

New York has come a long way since the days when there were no restrictions on the species at all.

Toadfish may be one of the few fish that are protected solely for ecosystem reasons (although federal fishery managers have extended limited protections to some forage species), but economic arguments can be made for protecting quite a few more.  For many species might be largely forgotten for purposes of conservation and management but, when taken together, still be important recreational and food species, merely because they are the only fish available in certain places during particular times of the year.

Back in the 1980s, my wife and I used to invite our then very young niece and nephew out to the house for a few days during the summer.  Going out on the boat and fishing was always on the agenda.

Back then, there was a 14-inch size limit for fluke and, I believe, a 12-inch size limit for weakfish (there was also a 24-inch limit for striped bass, but since the bass had not yet begun to recover for their collapse, that one was largely irrelevant), and no other restrictions on what one might keep.  So a casual day of fishing could amount to little more than grabbing a pack of frozen clams, or maybe some squid and spearing, and drifting around the backwaters catching whatever wanted to bite.

Over the course of an afternoon, we’d typically fill the livewell with a bunch of sand porgies and pin sea bass, with maybe a spot or a fluke or a weakfish for a little variety.  By the time we got back to the dock there would be enough fish swimming around in the well (despite the fact that I tossed as many as I could over the side when the kids weren’t watching) to turn my hands into pincushions by the time the cleaning was done. 

Our niece and nephew enjoyed it, and they kept coming out through most of their grade school years.

Today, we don’t have so much of that casual “family fishing” available in our local bays.  While some legal fluke, scup, and black sea bass can still be caught inside, higher size limits, particularly for the fluke and sea bass, pretty much dictate that most of the fishing take place in the ocean, where even on nice days a hostile inlet and rolling swell limit access for younger children and smaller boats.

But that’s where the blowfish and the other “forgotten” species come in.  While young anglers—and their families—looking for something to catch and take home in the waning days of summer can’t depend on the fluke, sea bass, and porgies that might have been available three decades ago, they can put together a pretty nice catch of blowfish and kingfish, and maybe a couple of spot and triggerfish, which have become more abundant in recent years.

And it’s not just about families fishing from their own boats.  When the wind blows, and makes transiting inlets uncomfortable and perhaps even dangerous, many party boats are stuck fishing in the bays; there is little question that the captains on those boats are always happy when their customers don’t go home with empty buckets, even if the fish that they catch aren’t the fluke or the porgies that they might have preferred.

So we need to remember those fish that are so easily forgotten.

Blowfish abundance tends to swing in boom-or-bust fashion; when the fish aren’t around, no one thinks much about them, but when there is a strong year class, and they reappear in large numbers, they are hit very hard by both anglers, who fill buckets with them while paying little attention to either numbers or size, and by commercial fishermen, who serve a restaurant trade that is always willing to put blowfish tails on the menu, even if some of those tails are surpassingly small,.

The sort of regulations that were discussed at the recent Advisory Council meeting, which would set a minimum size that allowed the females to spawn at least once and establish a reasonable bag limit for both commercial and recreational fishermen, might go a long way to smooth out highs and lows of blowfish abundance, and make them a more regular resident of the summer bay.

Although no formal recommendations were made, the same Advisory Council discussion that focused on blowfish also noted the increasing importance of another species, the northern kingfish.  A croaker not-too-distantly related to weakfish, kingfish are common on sand bottoms, readily take small, soft baits, and provide a good meal.  They’re not a big fish, averaging perhaps a foot long and—very rarely—reaching a maximum size of around 18 inches, but they can be abundant.  Like the blowfish, the fishery is completely unregulated and, like the blowfish, the abundance of kingfish can swing wildly from year to year.  A better understanding of its biology, along with appropriate regulations, could well make it a more consistent resident of local bays.

And then there are the other fish, species that have generally been shunned by anglers, or caught and quickly released, either because like the toadfish, they seemed too ugly to eat, or because they were otherwise deemed inedible.

On the mid-Atlantic coast, the striped sea robin may be one of the best examples.  Somewhat bizarre-looking, with a big, bony, spine-studded head, pectoral fins that flare out into broad “wings” and other fins that resemble feet and are used by the fish to “walk” across the bay bottom, sea robins were once seen as nothing but nuisances, and often killed and tossed on the beach for doing nothing more than eating bait that an anger had cast out for some prettier creature.

But people are beginning to learn that sea robins taste good, and are not really difficult to fillet.  More and more people are beginning to take them home, and some anglers are actively seeking them out when fluke and other more traditional food fish are hard to come by.  Sea robin tournaments are even beginning to crop up in New York and Connecticut.  

Although sea robins are not an important commercial species in the United States—less than 25,000 pounds, worth only about $4,275, were landed in 2021 in the New England and mid-Atlantic regions—they are a traditional food fish in southern Europe, where they are called “gurnard,” and their popularity is expanding into other parts of the continent.  It is not hard to imagine that, as commercial fishermen seek other species to make up for fishes that have become more difficult to harvest due to more restrictive regulations or climate-driven shifts in abundance, sea robin could see a similar increase in popularity.

Should that occur, and should sea robins experience an increase in commercial and/or recreational harvest, it is also not hard to imagine fishery managers being caught off guard, resulting in the scenario that played out in New York with respect to oyster toadfish repeating itself with the sea robin, leading to as-yet unpredictable ecological consequences.

Although this essay has focused on fish in the New York/upper mid-Atlantic region, the same situation exists all along the coast.  In New England, windowpane flounder (a/k/a “sundials” or “sand dabs”) used to be common in the bays and in the wash right off the beach.  Because the fish were so thin—only the dark side was really filletable, the white side was literally just skin and bone—they had little commercial value and usually ended up as lobster bait, although anglers might keep a few on a slow day, because what meat those bones carried tasted very good.  No one paid much attention to the low-value windowpane, until a stock assessment was performed and found them to be overfished.

Anglers aren't catching so many these days.

In the south, there are a plethora of small fish—grunts, mojarra, lookdowns, sand trout and the like—that are generally unmanaged, but collectively keep fishing rods bent for the people who fish from bulkheads and piers, and can provide a fine dinner for those who want to take the time to clean and cook the small fish.

These are the forgotten fish, that we only remember when, suddenly, they’re no longer around, and our bays seem a little emptier and less welcoming.  It’s a practical impossibility to manage them all, but like New York with its toadfish, and hopefully, in the future, with its blowfish as well, it’s always a good thing when one of them gets a little attention.