It was the summer of ’68.
August was drawing to a close,
and with the start of ninth grade looming, my friend Pat and I were doing all
that we could to make the most of our last, few days of freedom. So as the newborn sun slowly climbed out of
Long Island Sound to cast its light on the mouth of the Mianus River and the rest
of the Greenwich, Connecticut shoreline, it caught us aboard Pat’s 10 ½-foot
plywood skiff, snagging a couple of menhaden, the first step in our journey in
pursuit of big fish.
There had always been striped
bass and bluefish in the river and along the rest of the neighboring shore. Some of the bass might break 50 pounds, large
enough to qualify as “big fish” for most local anglers, but Pat and I had our
sights set a bit higher, on a cryptic denizen of the Sound that was not that
often seen but was always there, and which might eat that 50 pound striped bass
for lunch.
Our target was the brown—more properly,
“sandbar”—shark, which had been a part of the Long Island Sound ecosystem for millennia. It probably wasn’t long at all—using a
geological timescale—between the retreat of the glaciers that created both Long
Island and its namesake sound and the time the first browns arrived in that
sound’s waters and made it their summertime home. Yet, for a very long time, they got
surprisingly little attention from the folks living on the Sound’s shores.
When I was young, I read a book
about sharks that included a passage from the log of a small sailboat that cruised
the Sound’s waters around the start of the 20th Century. The writer talked about leaving some harbor
on the North Shore of Long Island—whether it was Huntington or Cold Spring Harbor
I can’t now recall, but I do remember that it was one of the harbors not too
far from Greenwich—and seeing what he called “big” sharks cruising the shallows
from the deck of his boat.
They were almost certainly
browns, with perhaps some sand tigers thrown in.
Every now and then, when I was a
boy, a fisherman bait fishing for striped bass or blues would hook a fish that
stripped all the line from his reel before he could pull up the anchor and give
chase. No striped bass or bluefish could
move so fast for so far.
And it was an annual rite of
summer to pick up the Greenwich Time and see a photo on its front page, that
showed members of the town’s marine police engaging in an armed “shark patrol”
off local beaches, ostensibly protecting bathers while, in reality, doing
little more than taking a ride in the sun.
But all of that was mostly
background noise that no one really listened to until ’68, when a couple of capable
anglers, fishing from two different boats, not only hooked, but actually
landed, a couple of brown sharks on a sleepy Sunday morning.
The next day, the Monday edition
of the Greenwich Time carried a photo of two big browns, allegedly seven feet
long and weighing 200 pounds, hanging from a rack near the spot where the
marine police docked (apparently, the police involved themselves in the capture
of both; my father and I were on the water when one of the sharks was being
fought, and watched two patrolmen board an angler’s boat, draw their revolvers,
and start firing in the fish’s general direction).
So Pat and I decided that it was
time to catch a brown shark, too.
We didn’t have any tackle heavier
than our striped bass rods, so we decided that we’d have to handline the
beast. We figured that we’d get the
biggest hooks we could find locally—which, looking back, were not very big—and
wire them into a water ski tow rope.
Then we’d tie the rope to the bow of Pat’s small skiff, and tie it again
to a cleat in the stern, using a reef knot that could be released with a simple
tug on the line once we hooked a fish.
At that point, the shark would be free to tow the boat from the bow,
giving us a Nantucket sleighride around the Sound until it tired, at which
point we’d drag it up on the nearest beach and…do something.
We never made a plan for what we
would do should a shark swim offshore, and take us to water deeper than the
towline was long…
In the event, we caught a couple
of menhaden, stuck them on the hooks, tied a rock to the end of the line in
lieu of a sinker, and began to slowly troll our baits around what seemed to be
promising places. All was going well
until the towline went tight and stopped the boat, powered by an old and wheezy
3 hp outboard, dead in its tracks.
We got a little excited and Pat
gunned the engine, but then the line went slack. We hauled it into the boat, and found one
hook straightened out—presumably by the rock or whatever obstruction it
might have snagged—and the other bait gone.
With the sun rising high and school starting in a couple of days, that was
pretty much the end of our shark fishing that year.
But the point is that, despite our
lack of success, there were quite a few brown sharks in the Sound in those
days.
Thus,
I was somewhat amused to read a recent Facebook post that began
“10 years ago, catching a brown shark in
Long Island Sound happened but not on a regular basis. Over the past three years the number of brown
sharks in Long Island Sound exploded at a frightening pace…”
It went on to talk about brown sharks
stealing hooked striped bass, claiming that they keep bass from biting, at
which point the author wrote that
“I believe they are detrimental to the
striper population. The sharks have been
protected for decades, and I believe it’s time that we need to control these
predators, as their population is spiraling out of control.”
It’s was little different from comments
being made elsewhere on the coast, particularly in the South, as anglers
complain about “their” fish being stolen by apex ocean predators.W
The truth of the matter is that brown (sandbar)
sharks are a slow-growing, late-maturing species that remains overfished. They don’t become sexually mature until 13 or
14 years old, and then only give birth to five pups after an 8- to 12-month
gestation period. Although a stock
assessment now being prepared could alter scientists’ views on the matter,
right now
the stock is not expected to be completely rebuilt until 2070.
Given such a life history, it’s not
plausible that “their population is spiraling out of control.”
But that comment conceals an even
bigger truth: 10 years is a completely
inadequate timespan for judging the health of a shark population.
After all, a brown shark takes
well over 10 years just to mature and breed for the first time, so using a mere
10-year timeline to gauge the stock’s status makes no sense at all. When I look back on sharks in Long Island
Sound, I’m looking back over 50 years to find something closer to a true
baseline—and I suspect that even then, the population was significantly smaller
than it had been an additional 50 years before.
The shark depredation debate has
been tainted by short-term thinking. A
recent essay that appeared on theconversation.com, titled "Sharks are
taking a bite out of anglers’ catch in the Gulf of Mexico, but culling isn’t
likely to help,” written by James Marcus Drymon, an Associate Exchange Professor
of Marine Fisheries Ecology at Mississippi State University, who has received a
grant from the National Marine Fisheries Service to study shark depredation,
uses the term “lifting baseline” to help explain anglers’ misperceptions.
While many people are familiar
with the “shifting baseline syndrome,” in which
“each new generation of fishermen accepts
the current, often reduced, status of a fish population as the baseline and
forgets that there was a time when these species were much more abundant,”
the “lifting baseline” is a
lesser-known phenomenon, even though it heralds good news. It occurs when
“conservation and management efforts [lead]
to population increases.
“Instances where populations have been
overfished and then rebuilt can create a perception of overabundance. When the species that’s recovering is a
predator, that can lead to human-wildlife conflicts.”
Thus, absent a long-term outlook
that reaches back to a time when sharks were at a more historically typical
level of abundance, their abundance and their impact on recreational fisheries
is likely to be substantially overstated. In a recently published paper, “Depredation: An old conflict with the sea,” Drymon notes
that
“[One study] used angler-documented
accounts of tournament-landed sharks to reconstruct a 70-year time series of
shark sizes in the northern [Gulf of Mexico].
Interestingly, there was clear evidence of shifting baselines; that is, the
gradual acceptance of a reduction in the abundance and size of species. Older anglers viewed changes in shark sizes
more accurately than younger anglers; specifically, only individuals over 60
years of age remembered a time when larger sharks were more common.”
The lack of such long-term
perspective is apparently resulting in many of the complaints about shark
depredation and claims that the shark population “is spiraling out of control.” It’s hard for some anglers to understand that
an increase in sharks is evidence of a healing ecosystem returning to some
semblance of normality when such anglers have never had the opportunity to know
what a healthy and “normal” ecosystem might look like.
And as competing predators,
anglers naturally object when a more efficient and more effective predator
steals their prey.
So it’s easy to forget that, when
it comes to predation, it’s
the sharks’ ocean, not ours; they have been swimming in it, and preying on its
inhabitants, for over 400 million years.
We anglers are merely visitors, members of a species that may have
always foraged for food at the edge of the water, but have only had a
significant impact on marine fish stocks in the past few hundred years. Recreational fishermen’s impacts on saltwater
fish stocks reach back far less than that.
Thus, from a historical
perspective, it is more than a little arrogant for the newcomers to demand that
shark populations be culled, just so that anglers might have a little more fun.
For when it comes to gauging the
health and abundance of shark populations, time matters. And, looking back in time, it becomes very
clear that today’s shark populations are neither overabundant nor “spinning out
of control.”
They’re just returning to where
they should have been all along.
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