The hot new buzzword in recreational fishery management
circles is shark “depredation.”
Over the past few years anglers, particularly in Florida and
some of the other southern states, have been whining about sharks stealing and
eating hooked fish that anglers’ wanted for their own meals. Not surprisingly, sharks
often target some of the largest fish that find themselves on fishermen’s
lines, as those are the fish that fight the hardest and longest, and thus ring
the loudest dinner bell for submarine predators, while irritating anglers all the more.
Depredation has been getting a lot of publicity lately, with
Rep.
Garret Graves (R-LA) inserting language into Rep. Jared Huffman’s (D-CA)
Sustaining America’s Fisheries for the Future Act of 2022 that would make
“Projects to better understand shark depredation, what causes
increases in the behavior, and how to best address the behavior”
a new priority for the National Marine Fisheries Service.
“To direct the Secretary of Commerce to establish a task
force regarding shark depredation, and for other purposes.”
“Improving understanding of the impacts of depredation on recreational
fisheries.”
I’ve written about the shark depredation issue before, and
won’t go any farther down that road today, except to note that of the species most
often accused of such depredation two, the sandbar and dusky sharks, remain
overfished, with the
rebuilding date for the former stock estimated at around 2070 , a
considerable while away, while the
rebuilding date for the latter is estimated to be sometime between 2084 and
2204, with 2107 the most likely year in that span,
meaning that most people reading this post probably won’t see a rebuilt stock
in their lifetimes.
Two
other alleged depredators, bull and lemon sharks, remain unassessed, and the
health of those stocks is unknown.
It seems a situation that calls out for caution.
Still,
fishermen complain that
“You can’t bring fish to the boat anymore because once you’re
hooked, they’ll eat them,”
claiming,
without factual support, that there is
“a small imbalance in our shark population,”
It wasn’t that long ago that we heard fishermen and
spearfishermen saying the same thing about Florida’s goliath grouper.
One
website, Floridagofishing.com, wrote in 2012,
“There is a big controversy that has erupted with anglers
complaining that these giants are reducing the population of sportfish on our
reefs due to their voracious feeding habits, and destroying the ecosystem of
the reefs. Anglers are frustrated when they
reel in their catch to have it stolen by yet another hungry Goliath. Once you hook up a giant you have to spend a
large amount of energy and to properly reel it in only to turn around and
release the unwanted catch. Anglers want
the species population reduced and have suggested opening them up to fishing
for a short time annually, possibly in the summer when there are less anglers
in the area. Anglers feel that someday
there will be nothing left but Goliaths on our offshore wrecks and reefs which
will definitely have an impact on tourism and the local fishing industry.”
Sound familiar?
In its report, NPR described the debate over permitting a
limited harvest of goliath grouper, and quoted one spearfisherman, Dick Kempton
of the St. Pete Underwater Club, who complained
“You can’t dive a range finder or a wreck in the bay or a
channel marker that hasn’t got one, two or three resident giants living there. They eat everything that comes by.”
The report also quotes biologist Chris Koenig, who has
studied the big groupers for over two decades.
Counter to some of the claims that goliaths have grown too abundant, he
opines that
“What we see is a population that is just teetering on the
edge.”
His wife, biologist Felicia Coleman, shares Dr. Koenig’s
long experience with goliath groupers, and has noted that while smaller goliaths were
abundant, the number of big fish was in decline, and followed that up by
saying,
“When you’re looking at population recovery, the important
thing is what is the size of the reproductive population, that is the adults.”
And the adults may not be doing as well as some anglers and
spearfishermen claim.
Despite
the warnings given by some biologists and other interested parties, Florida
ultimately decided to allow some harvest of goliath grouper, although to limit
any possible harm, they restricted such harvest to no more than 200 fish per
year, established a 24- to 30-inch slot
size limit, and required a $150 ($500 for out-of-state anglers) permit to
assure that only those seriously interested in harvesting a goliath might do
so.
Even with such
restrictions, the population of goliath groupers has apparently declined since
harvest was again permitted.
According to James Locascio of Florida’s Mote Marine Laboratory, a
study conducted at six goliath grouper spawning sites found that, at all but
one of such sites, the abundance of adult goliath grouper declined between 2013
and 2022.
Such decline probably cannot be blamed solely on Florida’s decision
to allow some goliath grouper harvest, since that is far from the only source
of fishing mortality. Dr. Locascio noted that, according to logbooks provided by commercial fishermen, about 1,700
goliath grouper had been caught and discarded between the years of 2000 and
2020; because such logbooks only represented about 10% of the region’s
commercial fishing fleet, the bycatch and dead discards of goliaths during that
period could have been substantially higher.
Although
adult goliath grouper may not be retained by fishermen, they are nonetheless
the target of a substantial recreational catch-and-release fishery, that sees
anglers dropping down large baits on heavy bottom fishing gear, in the hope of
catching and releasing a fish that might weigh in excess of 500 pounds. While there are rules governing such fishery
which are intended to limit release mortality, it is inevitable in any
recreational fishery, particularly those employing live bait, that some of the
released fish will not survive the experience.
Although the mortality rate may be relatively low when fish are
caught from a boat, where hooks can be easily removed and the weight of the
fish is always fully supported by the surrounding water, one of the attractions
of goliath grouper is that anglers don’t necessarily need a boat to catch one;
like sharks, goliaths
are readily available to the angler willing to put in the time and effort to
catch one from shore, or from shoreline structure such as piers, bridges and
causeways.
Thus, while
Florida law prohibits large goliath grouper to be removed from the water, one
can often find photos of fish dragged into water far too shallow to support
their full weight, fish that will have to be dragged back over the bottom for at
least a short distance before they can regain their ability to swim. Goliaths
caught from elevated structures such as piers and bridges remain in deep water,
but when the time comes for them to be released, they also remain out of
anglers’ reach, meaning that hooks often cannot be removed from their
mouths, forcing anglers to cut the leader some distance away from the fish.
Both those practices place additional stress on the fish,
and could easily increase the rate of release mortality.
Thus, placed in the overall context of commercial discards
and recreational release mortality, Florida’s recreational goliath grouper
harvest becomes just one more factor that, when added to all the rest, militates
against fully rebuilding the stock.
So the answer to the question, “How does a shark resemble a
goliath grouper?” is fairly simple.
Both sharks and goliath groupers include fish in their diets.
Both are opportunistic predators,
and both are more than willing to take the easy route of stealing a fish from
an angler’s line rather than chasing one down on their own.
Thus, both get anglers annoyed—so annoyed that anglers are
calling on fisheries managers to lower the predators’ numbers, so that people,
who come from the land to hunt fish, don’t have to compete with the native ocean predators for what the fishermen see as snapper and grouper and
other species that rightfully belong to them.
And, of course, sharks and goliath grouper resemble each
other in one more, very important way.
Many shark stocks, like the big grouper, are in tenuous condition, either
overfished or on the brink of such depletion, and additional harvest might well
push them over the edge.
Of course, that would probably please a large slice of the
recreational fishing community, who see both sharks and goliaths as little more
than obstacles to filling the fish box, and wouldn’t object if their numbers
were thinned.
It seems as if goliath grouper abundance may, once again, be on the decline, but managers can still keep sharks on the road to recovery.
Provided that they don’t yield to complaings about depredation, and so treat them the way that they did
the big groupers.
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