SHIFTING STOCKS: WHEN DOES A FISH BECOME "NATIVE"

 

I don’t recall when it was, other than it was back in the late 1960s or early ‘70s, when the bottom of Long Island Sound near my southwest Connecticut home seemed to be paved with “lafayettes,” the fish more properly known as spot, Leiostomas xanthurus.  

Few of the local fishermen had ever seen a spot before, and most of those who did had caught them somewhere else, since spot were and still are a popular inshore panfish from perhaps Delaware down into the southeastern states.  The books said that they ranged well up into New England, but the fact that my father, who had fished our Connecticut waters since the late 1920s, had never seen one before that year was testimony to how rarely that happened.  Yet that season—as I recall, it happened in late summer or early fall—it was impossible to toss a clam- or sandworm-baited hook into the water without having a spot attack it before it even hit the bottom.

Yet after that one brief occurrence, they were gone.  

Although I fished the same western Sound waters until I moved to Long Island in late ’83, and have gone back to fish there in just about every year since, I have never caught another spot along the Connecticut coast.  They invaded once, then retreated, and have never appeared in numbers again.

But in recent years, we’re seen a somewhat similar phenomenon, as fish that are not known to spawn—nor, in some cases, even to regularly visit—more northerly waters are beginning to appear on a regular, and perhaps even a predictable, basis as a warming ocean draws them up from their typical range.

Now, the question for fisheries managers is how to respond.

Managers in Alabama are currently facing that problem with snook.

While Alabama is certainly not considered a northern state for most purposes, it fits that description with respect to the snook, as that species’ range in the United States has historically been limited to the southern half of the Florida peninsula—from roughly Cape Canaveral on the Atlantic side to Tarpon Springs on the Gulf of Mexico—and the southernmost coast of Texas, where waters typically remain warmer than 50 degrees.

But as the waters of the Gulf of Mexico warmed, snook began to move farther north, first along the Florida panhandle, and then into Alabama’s waters.  The news website Al.com recently reported that

“Snook puts regulators and anglers in an interesting position.  It’s not a species native to Alabama, so it isn’t regulated.  However, for more than a decade now, people have been catching snook in the waters around [Alabama’s] Perdido Bay…

“Early on, officials though the snook were visiting, but not overwintering in Alabma waters.  Now, ‘they seem to overwinter,’ said [Kevin] Anson [of the Marine Resources Division of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources]…

“’Here’s the deal.  There’s two ways to look at it,’ said [Scott] Bannon [director of the Marine Resources Division].  ‘They’re not from here.  There’s no regulation, you could catch them all, we could go ahead and be done with it.  But most people that are catching them don’t want that, they want some form of protection.  As much as people think we’re a ‘no’ agency, our job is to provide access to the fisheries.  So, this is a new fishery, people are enjoying it, they should get to enjoy it.  So to come out with no data and say ‘no,’ I don’t think that really falls in line with the way we view how we do conservation.’

“’They’re not a native species, so in theory we could wipe them out and it’s okay, it has no impact on the environment,’ said Bannon.  But there’s also the possibility that protecting the new snook fishery could help it develop into a boon for coastal fishing.”

Alabama’s fishery managers ultimately proposed a one-fish bag limit and 24-inch minimum size, management measures that would be significantly less restrictive than the 1-fish bag limit and 28- to 33-inch slot size limit that currently prevails in the adjacent waters of Florida’s panhandle.

Al.com noted that

“The audience [attending a meeting on possible new regulations] seemed to favor taking action to nurture the snook fishery, possibly even the institution of a catch-and-release protocol or a tagging program.”

That Al.com article raises a number of issues that reach well beyond Alabama’s management of its emerging snook fishery.

For example, when should a fish be deemed to be “native” to a particular section of coastline?

A tarpon was caught on Martha’s Vineyard [Massachusetts] this fall, and a few years ago, I was trolling for tuna with a friend south of New York’s Long Island when my companion hooked and landed a small almaco jack, a fish that has been recorded as far north as New England, but is rarely caught north of the Carolinas.  It’s safe to say that neither fish was “native” to the waters that it was caught in.

But for the past decade, snook are being regularly caught in Alabama waters, just as anglers now regularly target tarpon in Virginia’s bays, and I can now target spinner sharks in Long Island’s coastal sea.  At what point do those fish stop being “occasional visitors” and become “native?”

The fact that they might not have been historically present, however “historically” might be defined, hardly seems a valid reason to deem them “non-native.”  After all, before the Wisconsin glacier retreated 11,000 years ago, fish like striped bass, black sea bass, and summer flounder would not have been “native” to New York’s coast which, because so much water was tied up in the ice, began near the edge of the continental shelf in those days, about where the 50 fathom contour exists today.

And it is highly unlikely that what are now Florida’s waters were warm enough to host snook at that time.

Instead, as waters warmed, fish began to shift their ranges northward as warming waters made northern waters more attractive at the same time that southern waters became too hot for them to tolerate.  They would also have initially been visitors, which only became “native” after ocean temperatures more-or-less stabilized, allowing ocean ecosystems to reach their own sort of equilibrium. 

Thus, as fish shift or extend their ranges northward today, in response to a further warming sea, can they reasonably deemed “non-native?”  Or are they merely tomorrow’s natives beginning to carve out a place in ecosystems that are adjusting to stress and change as temperatures rise?

And to that end, what should fisheries managers be doing to welcome the new arrivals, and perhaps create new fisheries as traditional fisheries—such as those for cod, winter flounder, and perhaps even striped bass—succumb to a changing climate and become increasingly less productive?

What criteria should fishery managers use to determine whether a regular visitor is now a “native” worthy of protection?

The Al.com article seems to suggest that when snook began to overwinter in Alabama, that might have made them enough to merit protection.  While that might make sense in the warmer Gulf states, in the northeast, many important recreational species, including striped bass and bluefish, spend their winters in warmer, more southerly waters rather than overwintering locally.  Similarly, localized spawning should hardly be a requirement for “native” status, as such requirement would render the long-revered striped bass “non-native” in most of New England.

Yet, right now, many of the newcomers find no protection at all; here in New York, we have no protections for species such as spot, Atlantic croaker, and sheepshead, all of which are becoming more regular visitors.  At what point should they merit regulatory action?

In the case of black drum, there is even a New York law, dating back many years, which would penalize anyone who catches and then releases a black drum alive, although dumping one--or many--back into the ocean dead seems to be completely legal.

The law was originally implemented after shellfishing interests importuned the state's legislature, arguing that shellfish beds must be protected from the drum's alleged depredations.  It's not clear that such rationale—which dates back to the days when states paid bounties to hunters who killed predators like coyotes, wolves, and seals—has any place in today’s changing world.

The fact that most anglers seem amenable to Alabama managing its new snook population, along with the fact that Alabama’s fisheries managers seem to understand the snook’s potential, and are willing to extend the fish regulatory protection, is a hopeful sign in these times, when shifting fish stocks and changing environmental conditions promise to wreak significant change on coastal ecosystems.

We can only hope that Alabama’s enlightened approach to snook is emulated all along the U.S. coast, with respect to all of the species that will be shifting into new waters, and providing new opportunities to those wise enough to embrace them.