JUST OUT: AN OBJECTIVE LOOK AT BYCATCH IN THE MENHADEN REDUCTION FISHERY

 

Anglers often like to throw (mostly metaphorical) stones at commercial fishermen, and every angler has a favorite target.

Some have a particular antipathy toward gillnetters, while others abhor folks who pull trawls.  Longliners, whether pelagic or bottom, have their share of critics, as do haul seiners, harpooners, and even those who earn their pay fishing with hook and line.  The hostility can vary by region, or the fish targeted.  Every angler has their own idea of what makes a commercial fishery particularly vile.  They often disagree.

Except when it comes to the menhaden reduction fishery, which has managed to attract the slings and arrows of just about every recreational fisherman, environmental advocates, and even some members of the commercial fleet.  And when you stop to think about it, that’s probably not surprising, because if you’re looking for a fishery to despise, the menhaden reduction fishery offers something for just about everyone.

Start with the fact that all of the menhaden reduction fishing in the United States is done by just two companies, Alpha VesselCo LLC,which does business under the name “Ocean Harvesters” and operates in both the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, and Daybrook Fisheries, which fishes solely in the Gulf.  Both operations are, at least for the fishing industry, large and heavily capitalized corporations, and certainly the antithesis of what might be called an “artisanal” fishery.  

Thus, the companies are a natural target for those who might sympathize with hardscrabble fishermen trying to make a living from the sea, but are philosophically opposed to “industrial fishing,” large corporations and the lobbyists, political connections, and financial influence that is carried along in their wake.

Taking things a step farther, the menhaden reduction operations are not completely domestic, but instead are operated by U.S. subsidiaries of foreign corporations.  While Alpha VesselCo owns and operates the 30 purse seine vessels that actually catch the menhaden, such vessels were originally owned by Omega Protein, which had to divest its fleet after it was acquired by, and became a division of, Cooke Inc., one of the world’s largest seafood and aquaculture companies, which is located in New Brunswick, Canada.  A long-term contract to supply menhaden to Omega Protein effectively ties Alpha VesselCo to Omega, even though the company is legally an independent entity.

Daybrook Fisheries is owned by the Oceana Group, a South African company specializing in fishing, fish products, and aquaculture.

Thus, although the people who are actually doing the fishing are United States residents, the foreign connection makes both Omega and Daybrook targets not only for those who don’t like large corporations, but also for those who don’t like the idea of “foreigners” harvesting fish in United States waters.  It’s a line you often hear from folks who want to shut down the reduction fishery, with one anti-reduction industry group going so far as to post on its website

“Who will win?  A Foreign Industrial Conglomerate or America.”

Of course, a fish neither knows nor cares who kills it, it is merely dead.  If one reduction fleet vessel ends up killing 1,500,000 menhaden on any given day (the Alpha VesselCo boats can hold between 1.3 and 2 million fish at any one time), or if 150 pound netters and smaller “bait” purse seiners kill just 10,000 menhaden each, the net result is still 1.5 million dead menhaden removed from the ecosystem.

But there’s something about the big reduction boats that draws a disproportionate amount of folks’ ire.

And it doesn’t help that at least one of the big operators, Omega Protein, has long maintained a sort of institutional arrogance, flaunting its political connections and openly defying decisions of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Menhaden Management Board. 

People tend to get upset about that sort of thing.

But from a policy perspective, what matters isn’t who gets their feelings hurt, or who might dislike large-scale fisheries, but whether those fisheries do any lasting harm to marine resources and marine ecosystems.  In that regard, the reduction fishery has come in for a lot of criticism, but as heated as that criticism might be, it rests on shaky factual foundations.

One organization, called “Save Our Menhaden,” has a fairly well-designed website (which nonetheless fails to disclose the name of even one of the people managing, directing, and/or financing such organization) urges people to

“Harass the ASMFC Menhaden Board,”

claiming, contrary to easily located information, that

“These are the folks who are in charge of setting limits and restrictions on industrial menhaden reduction fishing on the Atlantic Coast.  So far they have done nothing but sit on their hands and ignore all calls for a solution.  Give them your two cents by making a call or sending an email.”

In fact, the ASMFC’s Atlantic Menhaden Management Board constantly monitors both the state of the menhaden stock and level of menhaden harvest, including the harvest of the reduction fishery.  In 2006, despite the lack of any data suggesting that the move was needed, it imposed a precautionary harvest cap of 109,020 metric tons on the reduction fishery in the Chesapeake Bay, a cap that, despite a continuing lack of data justifying such action, was more than cut in half, to 51,000 metric tons, in 2017.

The Management Board also conducts regular stock assessments of the Atlantic menhaden resource, which utilize so-called “ecological reference points” that measure stock health in terms of the menhaden’s ability to fulfill its role as a forage fish.  The most recent full, or “benchmark,” stock assessment found that Atlantic menhaden biomass was above its target level, and that fishing mortality was below target, meaning that the stock was both completely healthy and on a favorable trajectory.  A stock assessment update released in 2022 came to the same conclusions.

Thus, any claims that the reduction fishery is doing harm to Atlantic menhaden stocks, or rendering the Atlantic menhaden stock unable to perform its ecological role as a forage fish, are without scientific support.

Although that doesn’t prevent folks from making such claims, particularly when they get paid to do so.

Critics of the reduction fishery have also claimed that the fishery generates high levels of bycatch, leading to the death and subsequent waste of a substantial number of non-target species, including many valued food and sport fish.

The reduction industry tries to minimize the issue, arguing that the bycatch level in the Atlantic menhaden fishery is less than one percent.  Still, one percent of 1.2 billion pounds of menhaden landings adds up to a substantial number.

And the reduction fishery certainly generates some bycatch.  When I was still living in Connecticut back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the big purse seiners often came all the way into western Long Island Sound, where their nets sometimes dragged across the bottom.  For a while, relations between anglers and the purse seiners weren’t too bad, and recreational fishermen were known to go up to the purse seine boats and ask for a bucket of menhaden, perhaps in exchange for a six-pack of Schaeffer, Piels, or some other cheap beer, so that they wouldn’t have to catch their own bait.  I know of at least one occasion when the bucket was returned full of weakfish rather than menhaden, mute testimony to the bycatch that was then taking place.

More recently, a purse seiner operating within the Chesapeake Bay incidentally caught and killed a number of big red drum, an incident that received quite a bit of publicity at the time.

So we know such things happen.  What we didn’t know was how often they happen, with anglers tending to think that bycatch is out of control, while the menhaden industry argues that it is negligible.

This week, a new study financed by the State of Louisiana provided one of the first good looks at bycatch in the reduction fleet.  It found that the reduction fleet in the Gulf of Mexico does have a substantial incidental catch, but not one large enough to have a material impact on important sport fish species.

Observers providing data for the study sampled 418 of the 13,144 sets made by menhaden reduction vessels in Louisiana waters during 2024—about 3.2 percent of the total—spread out across the fishing season.  The characteristics of the sampled sets, including depth, water temperature, and dissolved oxygen, were similar to those of all sets made by the reduction fleet.

Bycatch composition and survival rates differed depending on how fish interacted with the fishing gear.  Once a purse seine is set and drawn tight, the menhaden are removed by means of a 10-inch suction hose.  The head of that hose, which is lowered into the fish packed into the seine, is surrounded by a metal cage which limits the size of the fish that can enter the system.  At the other end of the hose, where fish are deposited into the vessel’s hold, there is a screen designed to divert bycatch into a chute and back into the water.  As a result, only menhaden and smaller fish taken as bycatch end up in the hold.

The study places all reduction fleet bycatch into one of three categories:  1) Rollover Bycatch, which are fish too large to fit through the cage fitted around the end of the suction hose, 2) Chute Bycatch, which are fish that are sucked up into the hose, but are later deflected back into the ocean rather than deposited into the vessel’s fish hold, and 3) Retained Bycatch, which is bycatch that goes into the fish hold along with the menhaden.

As one might expect, survival varies among bycatch types.

Rollover Bycatch has the highest survival rate, which seems reasonable given that all such fish remain in the net until released, and any harm suffered is a result of their limited ability to move in the packed purse seine, or of them being physically compressed by the other fish crowded into the net.

Of the 418 observed sets, 43—a little over 10 percent—had no Rollover Bycatch at all.  The average set resulted in a Rollover Bycatch of 11 individual fish, which might belong to any of 43 different species, although the amount of Rollover Bycatch varied widely by set, and ranged from zero to 128 individuals.  The study’s authors estimated that, for all reduction vessels fishing off Louisiana in 2024, Rollover Bycatch amounted to very slightly more than 145,000 individual fish, having a total weight of a little over 3.25 million pounds.

Five species accounted for two-thirds of the Rollover Bycatch, when measured in numbers of fish, and 52.8 percent when measured by weight:  cownose rays (estimated at 26,847 individuals/538,000 pounds across all sets made in 2024), red drum (26,752 individuals/575,500 pounds), black drum (18,680 individuals/319,000 pounds), gafftopsail catfish (13,809 individuals/40,000 pounds), and crevalle jack (10,525 individuals/260,000 pounds).  Various requiem sharks, of the genus Carcharhinus, accounted for 22.3 percent of the Rollover Bycatch by number, and 44.1 percent by weight.

The likelihood that individuals caught as bycatch would survive is linked to the fishes’ condition.  A fish exhibiting vigorous body movements and no external injuries was deemed to be in “excellent” condition.  Fish with weak body movements and/or with only minor external injuries were deemed to be in “good” or “fair” condition, while those with no body movement, but still moving their gill covers, and/or with serious external injuries were considered to be in “poor” condition.  Mortality was signaled by no body or gill cover movement, major external injuries and/or clear signs of death.

Most of the Rollover Bycatch was released in “excellent” or “good” condition, although that varied from species to species.  Of the important food and sport fish, 95.9 percent of the red drum were released in either “excellent” or “good” condition, with 70.4 percent falling into the “excellent” category.  Black drum reacted similarly, with 95 percent released in either “good” or “excellent” condition, and 80.7 percent rated “excellent.”  However, crevalle jack didn’t fare quite as well, with only 71 percent falling into the top two categories (just 22.1 percent rated “excellent”), while 19.1 percent were returned to the water dead.  Sharks, as a group, fared even worse, with 34.9 percent of spinner sharks and 27.9 percent of blacktip sharks dead when removed from the net.

Chute Bycatch saw far higher mortality rates, and far fewer fish released in either “excellent” or even “good” condition.  It was sampled in 414 of the 418 observed sets, and the good news is that out of those 414 sampled sets, 117—about 28 percent—had no Chute Bycatch at all.  Across all sampled sets, the average Chute Bycatch was 10.6 individuals, with the number in any given set ranging from zero to 220.  The researchers estimated that, across all sets made in Louisiana waters in 2024, Chute Bycatch totalled about 139,470 fish, belonging to 41 different species and weighing a total of 1.6 million pounds.

Five species of fish, four of which dominated the Rollover Bycatch as well, accounted for 80.7 percent of the individual fish in the Chute Bycatch, and 80 percent of the Chute Bycatch weight.  They included gafftopsail catfish (49,780 individuals/142,000 pounds), cownose ray (29,094 individuals/434,000 pounds), red drum (17,841 individuals/332,000 pounds), blacktip shark (8,818 individuals/268,500 pounds), and black drum (6,957 individuals/50,927 pounds).  Another five species—striped mullet, crevalle jack, sand seatrout, hardhead catfish, and finetooth shark accounted for another 13.4 percent of the Chute Bycatch when measured by number, and 10.2 percent when measured by weight.

Likely survival of the Chute Bycatch was not good.  81.9 percent of the blacktip sharks, 60.5 percent of the red drum, and 43.6 percent of the black drum were returned to the water dead.  Only about two percent of the red and black drum, and none of the blacktips, were in “excellent” condition when released.

And, of course, when it came to the Retained Bycatch, no fish survived at all.

415 of the 418 observed sets were sampled for Retained Bycatch.  All had some retained bycatch, with the average set having a Retained Bycatch of 59.8 individuals.  Across all sets made off Louisiana in 2024, Retained Bycatch was estimated to be 145.5 million individuals, belonging to 62 different species, and weighing an estimated aggregate of 23.1 million pounds.  Just four species accounted for 84.3 percent of the Retained Bycatch when gauged by individual animals, and 51 percent when measured by weight:  Atlantic croaker (80,592,690 individuals/5,478,000 pounds), sand seatrout (24,750,238 individuals/4,299,000 pounds), spot (11,685,469 individuals/1,501,000 pounds), and white shrimp (5,699,563 individuals/346,000 pounds).  Gafftopsail catfish accounted for another 16.8 percent of the catch by weight (3,830,000 pounds).

So, from a conservation/fisheries management perspective, what should we make of it all?

The study found that total bycatch, both dead and released alive, equaled about 3.59 percent of the reduction fleet’s catch when measured by weight, and 4.57 percent when measured by number.  Of that, retained bycatch equaled 2.98 percent of the fleet’s overall landings.

The big question is how the most popular sport and food fish were impacted by reduction fleet bycatch.  The study found that out of 44,593 red drum and 25,637 black drum taken as bycatch, 22,805 of the former and 16,551 of the latter survived—survival rates of 51.1 percent and 64.6 percent respectively. 

With respect to red drum and spotted seatrout, arguably Louisiana’s most important inshore sport fish species, the study found that

Ø  “Mortality estimates for Red Drum (in numbers) are not significantly different from those previously estimated by [the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries], however, the…study provided average weights of the Red Drum from the bycatch, which were not previously available.  These weights, physically taken from the bycatch, resulted in a higher total poundage of dead Red Drum, despite the total numbers being very similar to LDWF estimates.”

Ø  “Mortality estimates of Spotted Seatrout are higher than previously estimated by LDWF, as the…study does a more effective job of accounting for retained catch, which was not accounted for well in previous bycatch work upon which previous LDWF estimates were based.”

And, in what is the most significant finding,

Ø  “Despite the larger poundage of both Red Drum and Spotted Seatrout in menhaden bycatch, the stock status and length of time for stocks to approach management targets are likely to remain unchanged; however, the characterization and proportion of removals will change within the assessment.  [emphasis added]”

Are the results of the Louisiana study transferrable to other areas?  The answer is probably yes elsewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, where the fishery is generally prosecuted in shallow waters, with an average depth of just 15 feet of water, and rarely if ever deeper than 55 feet.  It’s not clear whether the answer will be the same on the Atlantic coast where, with the exception of some sets made in the Chesapeake Bay, much of the fishing takes place in the ocean, in federal waters more than three miles from shore, where the species mix is very different from what it is in the Gulf, and the purse seines remain above the bottom.

Yet, regardless of the study’s results, both sides of the reduction fishery debate—the menhaden industry and the broad array of foundation-funded organizations, consultants, public relations firms and others who are being paid to shut the industry down, in whole or in part—are already spinning the study’s findings to support their own arguments.

The Menhaden Fisheries Coalition, a group that includes the two big reduction fleets among its members, has declared that

“The study reaffirms what decades of science have consistently shown:  Louisiana’s Gulf menhaden fishery is sustainable, selective, and not a threat to red drum populations.”

On the other hand, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a long-time opponent of the reduction fishery, responded to the study’s findings with a press release that shouted,

“Data suggest 22,000 or more mature redfish and a host of other sportfish, forage fish killed annually by pogy boats off Louisiana.”

Ben Landry, speaking on behalf of Ocean Harvesters/Alpha VesselCo, elaborated on the industry’s position by noting,

“The study confirmed much of what we’ve seen firsthand—high survival rates when fish remain in the net and gains from gear improvements.  We didn’t wait to act.  As soon as the science came in, we upgraded our entire fleet’s gear to reflect its findings.  It’s another step forward in our long-standing commitment to responsible, sustainable fishing,”

which may be a little bit of an overstatement with respect to upgrading the “entire fleet’s gear,” as the study noted that there is substantial variation in the cage that prevents larger fish from being sucked up the suction hose; some hoses are affixed with narrow-slatted cages that allow relatively little bycatch to pass through, while others have cages with much wider gaps that are far from state of the art, and lead to higher levels of bycatch mortality.  Most have excluder cages that fit somewhere between those two extremes.

So there’s certainly room for at least a little improvement on the industry’s side.

At the same time, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership’s Chris Macaluso, the director of its Center for Fisheries and Mississippi River Programs, fretted that

“The results are concerning, especially given the efforts underway for the last year to make Louisiana’s redfish population healthier by ending the recreational harvest of large, breeding-size redfish.”

Yet, while the 22,000 or so red drum killed each year as by bycatch in the reduction fishery aren’t insignificant, they pale beside the nearly 750,000 red drum landed by Louisiana’s recreational fishermen each year.  So if Mr. Macaluso is truly concerned with red drum conservation, it would seem that his time would be better spent asking that additional restrictions—perhaps cutting one fish off the bag limit, or narrowing the current slot size limit by an inch or two—be placed on the recreational fishery, rather than worrying about the menhaden fleet which, when all is said and done, kills less than 3 percent of the fish that are removed from Lousiana’s red drum population each year by its recreational fishermen.

Regardless of how many studies are released, it's unlikely that the menhaden industry and its many antagonists are going to stop taking shots at each other any time soon.

But, thanks to the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fish and the study that it commissioned, we finally have some good science that provides an objective look at reduction fleet bycatch, which should allow regulators to cut through the noise and adopt regulations based on fact, and not someone’s fancy.

 

 

 

COASTAL SHARKS: THE SILLY SEASON BEGINS

 

About ten days ago, the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation announced that

“On June 25, at approximately 4:15 p.m., a 20-year-old female park visitor was waist deep in the surf at the Central Mall beachfront at Jones Beach State Park when she reported being bitten by unknown marine wildlife.”

The announcement mentioned that the bites resulted in “minor lacerations” to one foot and leg, described her medical care in fair detail, and noted that

“The swimmer did not observe what caused her injuries.”

The announcement went on to reveal that swimming resumed at the beach the following morning, that

“Prior to opening, Park Police and Park staff used drones to actively search for large schools of fish and other marine life,”

and that lifeguards, watching from shore and from surf boats and jet skis, were also patrolling the waters.

Finally, near the bottom of the announcement, the Parks office conceded that

“[The Department of Environmental Conservation] coordinated with experts to assess what species may have caused these injuries.  DEC biologists reviewed situational information provided by subjects at the scene, as well as photos of the injury, and were able to rule out several species.  However, without direct observation of the animal that caused the bites a full expert consensus was not reached.  DEC concludes this incident most likely involved a juvenile sand tiger shark (Carcharias taurus).”

Silly season has returned to Long Island’s South Shore.  It even came a little early this year.

There’s just something about sharks that seems to make it happen.

Not long ago, nobody spent too much time thinking about sharks when they stepped off the sand into the water, at least not unless they were watching a particular movie the night before.  The International Shark Attack Files, which are maintained by the Florida Museum, reported that prior to 2022, there were only a dozen unprovoked shark attacks recorded in all the state’s history, although four of those occurred in the previous decade, with one in 2012, one in 2015, and two in 2018.

But the pace picked up in 2022, when a record eight individuals had  unplanned, toothy encounters, and another five got themselves nipped in 2023.  The sharks and the swimmers managed to keep out of each other’s space last year, with no interactions reported, but recent events at Jones Beach suggest that 2025 might prove to be another interesting year.

In any event, the overreactions have already begun.

The story of the Jones Beach incident was picked up by major media outlets, ranging from the more-or-less local New York Times to CNN.  And because a few minor cuts aren’t really news, they had to spice it up a bit, with the Times ranging all the way down to Hilton Head, South Carolina to report on two more incidents there, and then even farther around the coast to the Gulf side of Florida, where a girl recently suffered some fairly serious shark damage to one of her hands while snorkeling.

CNN didn’t refer to any recent, distant encounters, but instead provided some faint reassurance by quoting a local beachgoer.

“’I been here my whole life and never seen a shark in here,’ Alejandro Aranjo told CNN affiliate ABC.

“Aranjo visits Jone Beach with his family, but following Wednesday’s incident, ‘I don’t even know if I’m going to let them go in to be honest.’”

The plain truth is that whether one sees a shark or not, they currently are, always have been, and hopefully always will be in the waters south of Long Island, some swimming off of popular bathing beaches, and others coming into our sheltered and, in the minds of many unfamiliar with the coast, supposedly shark-free bays.

Great South Bay, the big barrier lagoon that lies behind Fire Island as well as part of the barrier island that hosts Jones Beach, is a known nursery area for sand tiger sharks, the species that supposedly nipped the Jones Beach bather, but it’s surprising how many people have no idea that they’re there, even though there are a small group of individuals who regularly encounter them while fishing in the bay or even inside the breakwalls of some bayside marinas.

Sand tigers are a fearsome looking fish, with snaggletoothed jaws that seem made for causing mayhem.  They’re a standby in coastal aquariums, where a combination of their menacing appearance, impressive size (they can often reach a length of eight feet, with a few large individuals making it to a little over ten), and relatively lethargic lifestyle makes them well-suited to life in the shark tank.  

But despite their appearance, they tend to be a slower-moving animal that usually stays near the bottom of bays, estuaries, and the nearshore ocean, preying on fish, cephalopods, and similar animals.  However, they will sometimes rise higher in the water column, particularly around wrecks and other fixed structures, where they can gulp air to make it easier to “hover” at mid-depths, and sometimes exhibit surprising bursts of speed while ripping through a school of small baitfish.

They often feed in cloudy, phytoplankton-dense water, that conceals them from their target baitfish, but also impairs the vision of both the sharks and anyone who happens to be wading nearby.  Thus, people sometimes unknowingly kick or step on sand tigers while at the beach, leading to a reaction bite, while the sand tigers sometimes nip someone who inadvertently gets between them and a  baitfish.  They can also mistake a flashing hand or foot for a fish that they might want to eat.

So people get bitten, but the bites can hardly be described as “shark attacks.”

Yet the hype tends to ignore the reality.

A July 3 article in the Hudson Valley Post declared that

“Shark attack prompts emergency changes at New York beaches,”

and quoted Governor Kathy Hochul, who assured New York residents that

“We are continuing to strengthen our shark surveillance capabilities and safety tactics at these beaches to help protect these treasured summertime traditions.  I encourage all beachgoers to stay safe, stay alert and always follow direction of lifeguards and park staff.”

The New York Times advised readers,

“Don’t Let Shark Panic Spoil Your Fourth of July,”

and told them that

“Today we’ll look at how concerned about sharks you should be if your plans for the long Fourth of July weekend include going to the beach,”

perhaps never realizing, and very possibly not caring, that if the press—including the Times—didn’t make such a fuss over every minor bather/shark interaction, people almost certainly wouldn’t be concerned at all—in fact, they probably never would have even heard about the incident.  I don’t live all that far from Jones Beach, but never got word of this season’s first nip until I read the Park Department’s announcement.

Although, taken on balance, the Times piece did a good job of putting things in perspective.

It included a very accurate assessment of the situation, provided by John Sparks, a curator in the department of ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History, who said,

“I tell people have fun—the threat is minimal.  You’re always swimming around sharks.  You always have been.  My bottom line:  You shouldn’t be any more worried than you’ve ever been.”

The fact that one person, out of the countless thousands who have visited Long Island’s beaches so far this year, had a shark interaction doesn’t change the fact that the odds against running into a shark’s dentures off Long Island are somewhere around four million to one.

The odds of dying in a car crash on the Meadowbrook or Wantagh Parkways, on your way to or from the beach, are quite a bit more daunting, but beachgoers haven’t stopped driving.  They haven’t even slowed down.

The Times article provided some tips for making an interaction even less likely, such as not swimming around schools of baitfish that sharks might choose to eat, staying out of the water during low-light hours when sharks are more active, and staying out of murky water, noting that the water was, in fact, murky at the Jones Beach bite site.

It also reassured readers that the state has increased its total of shark-search drones from 22 to 28 this year, while increasing the number of trained drone pilots from 40 to 48.  That ought to make beachgoers feel good, although if the water is really clouded with phytoplankton and surf-roiled sand, the odds of those drones spotting a shark making its way along the bottom is not particularly good.

And, as others have noted, there are always sharks making their way along the bottom, top, and middle of the water column.  I used to be an active recreational shark fisherman.  Now, I’ve taken what I’ve learned in a few decades of shark fishing, and am using it to help researchers at Stony Brook University study our inshore shark population.  Fishing not that far offshore, so far this year we've caught blue, common thresher, dusky, sandbar, and shortfin mako sharks; one of the researchers, fishing from another boat and closer to shore, has already caught a couple of spinners.  In other seasons, our catch has included white sharks, tigers, and various species of hammerheads.

The fact that we catch those fish offshore doesn’t mean that they stay there.  The researchers implant each fish with acoustic tags, and those acoustic tags are detected every time one of the sharks passes by one of the receiver arrays located well within sight of Long Island’s beaches.

The arrays detect a lot of tagged sharks passing by.

But the people who really understand about inshore sharks are the surfcasters.  Sometimes they catch them—although targeting so-called “prohibited species” such as sand tigers, sandbars, duskies, and whites is illegal—but even when they aren't catching any sharks, surfcasters are acutely aware that they’re in the sharks’ world.

When chasing striped bass, surfcasters regularly go out in the dark of the night, often wearing wetsuits that make it easier for them to swim out to a rock or distant sandbar, from which they then cast their baits and lures (and, coincidentally, make them closely resemble a struggling seal).

Sometimes, they hook a bass or a bluefish, feel the fish’s struggles intensify for a moment or two, then go quiet, only to reel in the fish’s head and a few scraps of body.

Other times, when they’re thoughtless enough to hang their catch from a stringer attached to their belt, they find themselves suddenly being pulled off a rock or a bar as a shark goes after their fish.

And one time, a friend told me about a trip that he made on a dark, moonless night, somewhere off Montauk.  He was standing on a rock, casting live eels into the surf, when he felt a piece of driftwood bump into his leg.  He pushed it away, but a while later, it hit him again, and he again shoved it into the waves.  The third time it happened, my friend reluctantly snapped on a light, and found a four-foot sandbar shark taking covetous glances at his eel pouch.

Such stories aren’t particularly rare.

Yet, as long as I’ve lived on Long Island—and that’s we’ll over forty years—I’ve never heard of a surfcaster being intentionally gnawed by a shark, even though they’re often handling bait, and are in waters that sharks often frequent.

Because the bottom line is that, even for them, the risk is not high.

It’s hard to say whether the June 25 incident will stand alone, or whether similar episodes will follow; recently, July has been the “hot” month  so they very well may.  But what we can be sure of is that if another such incident occurs, it will be blasted across TV and radio, and hyped all out of proportion in the press.

Maybe Amity’s fictional Mayor Vaughn really did get it right in that movie five decades ago:

“…it’s all psychological.  You yell barracuda, everybody says, ‘Huh?  What?’  You yell shark, we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.”

It’s silly.

But it’s also the summer, and summer is the season for that sort of thing.

 

ADMINISTRATION RENEGES ON NATION'S PROMISE TO RESTORE COLUMBIA/SNAKE RIVER SALMON

 

In September 2023, the Biden administration issued a “Memorandum on Restoring Healthy and Abundant Salmon, Steelhead, and Other Native Fish Populations in the Columbia River Basin.”  The Memorandum acknowledged that

“Actions since 1855, including the Federal Government’s construction and operation of dams in the Basin, have severely depleted fish populations.”

The Memorandum went on to declare a federal policy

“…to carry out the requirement of the Pacific Northwest Electric Power Planning and Conservation Act (Public Law 96-501) to operate, manage, and regulate the [Columbia River System] to adequately protect, mitigate and enhance fish and wildlife affected by Federal dams in the Basin in a manner that provides equitable treatment for fish and wildlife with the other purposes for which the Federal dams are managed and operated.”

The Biden administration followed up three months later by announcing an agreement that

“when combined with other funding that the Administration is anticipated to deliver to the region, will bring more than $1 billion in new Federal investments to wild fish restoration over the next decade and enable an unprecedented 10-year break from decades-long litigation against the Federal government’s operation of its dams in the Pacific Northwest.”

That agreement, entered into between the United States and other parties to ongoing litigation, was filed in the Federal District Court for the District of Oregon, and was to be implemented through a memorandum of understanding between the United States, the states of Washington and Oregon, four Native American tribes, and various environmental organizations.

However, the Trump administration has recently caused the United States to breach its written agreement with the other parties, and destroy much of the progress that has been made in reaching agreement on how to conserve and, ideally, rebuild native fish stocks in the Columbia River Basin.

A so-called “fact sheet” issued by the White House on June 12 announced that

“President Donald Trump Stops the Green Agenda in the Columbia River Basin.”

The “fact sheet” began:

“STOPPING RADICAL ENVIRONMENTALISM:  Today, President Donald J. Trump signed a Presidential Memorandum revoking an executive action issued by the prior administration that called for ‘equitable treatment for fish.’”

Bullet points in the “fact sheet” noted, among other things, that

“Today’s Memorandum revokes the Biden Administration’s ‘Restoring Healthy and Abundant Salmon, Steelhead, and Other Native Fish in the Columbia River Basin’ Memorandum, which placed concerns about climate change above the Nation’s interests in reliable energy resources,”

and

“The specified agencies will coordinate with the Council on Environmental Quality to review and revise environmental review processes related to matters in the [Memorandum of Understanding filed with the Federal District Court], save federal funds, and withdraw from the [Memorandum of Understanding].”

And that was the last time that the “fact sheet” even mentioned the words “salmon,” “steelhead,” or “fish,” words that the rest of the document made clear were hardly in the administration’s vocabulary.  Instead, it immediately went on to blare,

“RESTORING AMERICAN ENERGY DOMINANCE AND SECURING AMERICAN PROSPERITY:  President Trump continues to prioritize our Nation’s energy infrastructure and use of natural resources to lower the cost of living for all Americans over speculative climate change concerns.”

The salmon and other depleted fish stocks are given a little lip service, with the statement that

“President Trump recognizes the importance of ensuring the future of wildlife populations in the Columbia River Basin, while also advancing the country’s energy creation to benefit the American public.”

Which may well be true.  Trump might truly recognize “the importance of ensuring the future of wildlife populations in the Columbia River Basin,” but there is a big difference between merely recognizing something, and taking meaningful action, and when it comes to wildlife—in just about any context, not just the Columbia River—it’s pretty clear that Trump has little desire to take any action to preserve its future, particularly if that actions might make corporate interests uneasy.  Thus, the “fact sheet” complains that

“The [Memorandum of Understanding] required the Federal government to spend millions of dollars and comply with 36 pages of onerous commitments to dam operations on the Lower Snake River,”

and that

“Dam breaching would have resulted in reduced water supply to farmers, eliminated several shipping channels, had devastating impacts to agriculture, increased energy costs, and eliminated recreational opportunities throughout the region,”

but never mentions how dishonoring the Memorandum of Understanding, and not breaching the lower Snake River dams, will impact the future of wildlife—and most particularly the runs of anadromous fishes—in the Columbia River Basin. 

Because, if we want to be honest, he doesn’t particularly care.

Instead of even mentioning the future of currently threatened and endangered salmon runs, or of promising some sort of action that might preserve their future, the fact sheet ignores the fish entirely, and instead trumpets that

“President Trump signed an Executive Order reinvigorating America’s beautiful clean coal industry to support grid stability and hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs.”

We are assured that

“President Trump’s commonsense approach to environmental conservation empowers the American people to take full advantage of our nation’s vast and great natural resources.”

At least, so long as those resources last.

Various corporate spokesmen endorsed the administration’s actions.  The Seattle Times reported that Kurt Miller, the CEO of the Northwest Public Power Association, said that

“This withdrawal is a necessary course correction toward energy reliability, affordability, and transparency.  In an era of skyrocketing electricity demand, these dams are essential to maintaining grid reliability and keeping energy bills affordable.”

Similarly, the executive director of Northwest River Partners, the trade association representing those who use and profit from the dammed river, said that

“Now is the time to come together and chart a sustainable path toward effective solutions that protect salmon and maintain affordable and reliable hydropower needed by millions of people in the Pacific Northwest.”

It is probably notable, however, that he didn’t even try to suggest what such solutions might be.

But the various industries with a financial incentive to support the status quo aren’t the only people to speak out on the issue.  Anyone focused on the river’s value to salmon, rather to various corporate uses, probably condemned the current administration’s decision.

The four Native American tribes that had been involved in the long-lived litigation that had was, temporarily, stayed after the Biden-era agreement was filed with the Federal Court—the Yakima, Nez Perce, Warm Springs, and Umatilla—were among the most aggrieved of the parties; such tribes had been guaranteed access to the river and to its salmon in treaties dating back to the 19th century.

Gerald Lewis, chairman of the Yakima Tribal Council, stated that

“The federal government’s historic river management approach is unsustainable and will lead to salmon extinction.  Courtroom battles cannot provide the innovative, holistic solutions we need.  This termination will severely disrupt vital fishery restoration efforts, eliminate certainty for hydro operations, and likely result in increased energy costs and regional instability.”

But perhaps the most succinct, and most appropriate, comment came from the chair of the Yakimas’ Fish and Wildlife Committee, Jeremy Takala, who observed that

“We reserved the right to actually catch fish, not merely the right to dip our nets into barren waters.”

But Native Americans aren’t the only people who expect to get hurt.

Liz Hamilton, the policy director for the Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association, responded to that action by saying

“It was a big loss for the Northwest’s economy, and a dagger to the heart of our industry.”

More criticism appeared in an article in Outdoor Life magazine.  Although the hook-and-bullet press tends to be a little right-leaning, and often takes a conservative stance, that article had nothing good to say about the White House abandoning the Memorandum of Understanding.  It reported that, in 2021, 68 leading fisheries scientists wrote a letter to policymakers stating that

“The survival problems of various [Endangered Species Act]-listed salmon and steelhead species in the Columbia Basin cannot be solved without removing four dams on the Lower Snake River.”

The letter came to the conclusion that

“These four dams must be removed to not only avoid extinction, but also to restore abundant salmon runs.”

The Outdoor Life piece went on to observe that

“In its June 12 memorandum, however, the Trump Administration chalked up those conclusions to ‘speculative climate change concerns.’  It explained that by pulling the federal government and its funding out of the [agreement], it was ‘stopping radical environmentalism’ and ‘securing American prosperity.’  In addition to fundamentally mischaracterizing the agreement itself, Thursday’s announcement appeared to imply that speaking up for fish and considering alternatives to the status quo is part of a green agenda meant to harm the American public.  [emphasis added]”

 The Outdoor Life piece continued,

“Conservationists and wild fish advocates are deeply disappointed by Trump’s decision to axe the agreement, which also paused a series of ongoing lawsuits that have dragged on for decades, and would have contributed more than a billion dollars in federal funding to solving a big, hairy problem.  They say the move sets back our country’s salmon recovery efforts substantially, returning us to a zero-sum game of endless litigation that pits energy against fish.”

The magazine quotes Chris Wood, the president of Trout Unlimited, who lamented that

“It was one of the first times that we had a collaborative effort where people agreed to come together—nobody’s hand was forced, there wasn’t a judge or a court insisting on this.  Now, we’re back to the beginning—where we had been for the previous 20 years, which is just relying on the Endangered Species Act to keep these most amazing of God’s creatures from blinking out.”

To provide some context to the issue, the magazine article notes that

“The Columbia-Snake River system was once the most productive salmon and steelhead fishery in the world.  Today, these anadromous runs are a shadow of their former selves, with wild fish returning at less than two percent of their historical abundance…

“The main objective of the 2023 agreement, Wood adds, was for stakeholders to work together to increase those returns.  It was not a decision to breach the Lower Four Snake River Dams, nor did it support legislation to authorize dam breaching.  The dams are owned by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and removing or redesigning them would require an act of Congress…

“In many ways, the agreement reached in 2023 provided a road map for…difficult conversations.  It established a Tribal Energy Program to help the Columbia River Treaty Tribes develop their own renewable energy sources.  It provided federal guidance for replacing and/or redesigning the current irrigation and transportation systems in the Lower Snake region.  And it provided the funds to make those solutions workable.  Perhaps more importantly, though, it paused the Gordian knot of ongoing lawsuits around the Lower Four dams in an effort to bring stakeholders back to the negotiating table.”

Now, it appears that the litigation will continue.  Amanda Goodin, an attorney with Earthjustice who has represented plaintiffs in the legal action, has observed that

“So without the agreement, there is no longer any basis for a stay [of the ongoing litigation]."

The litigation will almost certainly resume.

It’s not a great solution.  But when plaintiffs are forced to deal with a nation willing and seemingly eager to break its word and dishonor its promises, it is the only solution that they have.

 

 

 

MARINE RECREATIONAL FISHERMEN: OVERWEENING ENTITLEMENT

 

About a month ago, the New York Times reported that a charter boat captain in the Gulf of Mexico was sentenced to 30 days in federal prison, and required to pay a $51,000 fine, for violations of the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act.

Apparently, the captain—Zackary Barfield, who operated the Panama City. Florida-based boat Legendary New Beginning—didn’t like the fact that bottlenosed dolphin were snatching some red snapper off his clients’ lines, and felt that such thefts entitled him to retaliate by intentionally shooting and poisoning the dolphin when the opportunity arose.

According to a press release issued by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Florida,

“…From 2022-2023, he poisoned and shot bottlenose dolphin on multiple occasions.

“In the summer of 2022, Barfield grew frustrated with dolphins eating red snapper from the lines of his charter fishing clients.  He began placing methomyl inside baitfish to poison the dolphins that surfaced near his boat.  Methomyl is a highly toxic pesticide that acts on the nervous system of humans, mammals, and other animals, and is restricted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to control flies in non-residential settings.  Barfield recognized methomyl’s toxicity and impact on the environment but continued to feed poisoned baitfish to the dolphins for months.

“While captaining fishing trips in December 2022 and the summer of 2023, Barfield saw dolphins eating snapper from his client’s [sic] fishing lines.  On both occasions, he used a 12 gauge shotgun to shoot the dolphins that surfaced near his vessel, killing one immediately.  On other occasions, Barfield shot, but did not immediately kill, dolphins near his vessel.  On one trip he shot a dolphin while two elementary-aged children were on board, and another with more than a dozen fishermen on board.”

The New York Times noted that

“…Barfield shot at least five dolphins, with one confirmed killed…

“The poisonings most likely resulted in many more deaths, the authorities said.

“’Based on evidence obtained in the course of the investigation, Barfield fed an estimated 24-70 dolphin poison-laden baitfish on charter trips that he captained,’ NOAA said. ‘Barfield stated he was frustrated with dolphins ‘stealing’ his catch’”

And, the Times reported, Barfield’s actions weren’t particularly unusual.

“From 2014 to 2024, at least 21 dolphins were killed by gunshot wounds, arrows, explosives, and other sharp objects, according to NOAA data.  Officials said that figure is most likely a severe undercount.”

Because too many folks in the recreational fishery feel that all the fish in the ocean belong to them, and they are entitled to do what they need to to protect their supposed property.

The situation is, if anything, worse when it comes to sharks.  Although most shark species off the East Coast of the United States saw significant declines in population during the late 20^th century, a few stocks such as the blacktip remainabundant, and it appears that others, such as the sandbar, may be well on their way to recovery (although a new sandbar shark stock assessment has been  indefinitely delayed due to both a reduction in funding for the National Marine Fisheries Service and a reduction in the scientific staff at the Southeast Fisheries Science Center, which will be conducting the assessment when the needed resources are finally available).

As some shark numbers begin to increase, shark interactions with anglers have also spiked, as sharks, no less than dolphins, are not above stealing a struggling fish from an angler’s line.  As a result, such “shark depredation” is now at the forefront of the angling debates.

And, probably to no one’s surprise, too many charter boat captains and recreational fishermen respond to shark depredation in the same way that Capt. Barfield responded to bottlenose dolphin stealing his clients’ red snapper—they want to kill them off.

I first wrote about this a couple of years ago, when a tournament down in Florida was established, seemingly for the primary purpose of thinning out the shark population.  According to one report on the Floridan news website WSTPost,

“officials at the event said that the shark population needs to be controlled and they hope the tournament will draw public attention to it.  Captain Jason, who helps organize the tournament, said it was affecting their livelihood.  ‘Any boat that comes out and parks on the local reef immediately has 10 or 12 sharks under your boat every second of every time you go out there and fish,’ said Captain Jason.  ‘You can’t bring fish to the boat anymore because once you’re hooked, they’ll eat them.”

Comments on a Facebook page announcing the tournament evidenced the hostility many anglers have for the ocean’s apex predators, as recreational fishermen posted things like

“I’ll kill a few of those beasts in honor of your tournament even though I won’t be in it.”

“…I don’t kill sharks because they kill humans.  I kill them because there are WAY TOO MANY.  They have overpopulated themselves and I for one am doing any and everything I can to help bring down that population.  How many sharks die an hour IN THE USA?  Answer:  NOT ENOUGH.  Bring back the long liners!”

“Make sure you leave some dead ones on the reef, that way the rest of em get the message.”

And

“Make a huge pile!!!!”

The ironic thing is that, even if some shark populations are larger than they were twenty-five years ago, they are probably still significantly smaller than they were in the mid-20^th century, and that it might be the increase in recreational fishing activity, as opposed to an increase in the number of sharks, that is the prime contributor to the problem

A little over a year ago, a paper titled "Depredation:  An old conflict with the sea,” written by Dr. James Marcus Drymon, et al, appeared in the journal Fish and Fisheries.  The authors observed that

“[Some studies]  suggest that increases in shark populations and/or learned behavior in sharks do not fully explain the increase in shark depredation documented by anglers.  Something else may be contributing to the increased conflict.  Using angler effort NOAA’s Marine Recreational Information Program, we can see a clear increase in the number of charter-for-hire fishing trips off Alabama in recent years.

“While far from a smoking gun, the above exercise highlights the complexities of this human-wildlife conflict.  In 1936, Hemingway was one of a small group of anglers fishing a virgin stock of bluefin tuna in Bimini.  Today, there are more anglers on the water than any time in history, and the stocks they target are far from virgin biomass.  Are there more sharks in the [Gulf of Mexico] than there were 20 years ago?  Very likely.  Are there more sharks in the [Gulf of Mexico] than there were in Hemingway’s time?  Likely not.  [citations omitted]”

The paper goes on to note that the current generation of anglers has probably never seen a healthy shark population, and so, based on their limited experience, sees today’s recovering populations as an “overabundance” rather than a return to more normal population levels.

“[In another study], there was clear evidence of shifting baselines; that is, the gradual acceptance of a reduction in the abundance or size of a species.  Older anglers viewed changes in shark sizes more accurately than younger anglers; specifically, only individuals over 60 years of age remember a time when larger sharks were more common.  [citations omitted]”

Dr. Drymon has called such misperception of overabundance, driven by past experiences with only depleted stocks, the “lifting baseline syndrome,” and explains,

“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.”

In the case of sharks, far too many anglers want such conflicts resolved by removing many of the sharks from the ocean.

Of course, sharks aren’t the only fish facing such hostility.  Recreational fishermen down in Florida have a strong dislike for goliath grouper, for about the same reasons—the big grouper eat some of the same fish that the anglers want to catch, and aren’t shy about grabbing the odd snapper or grouper from a fisherman’s line.  Recently, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission posted on its Facebook page, announcing the arrest of a spearfisherman who illegally killed a smallish goliath grouper, that weighed something over 100 pounds, only to have many of the people who commented take the poaching spearfisherman’s side.

Their the comments sounded much like those made in favor of killing more sharks.

“Goliath Grouper AND Gators need to be open season, no size limit or bag limit.”

“the [sic] goliaths are far from extinct my friend.  We can’t even get away from them 80 miles off shore.  They have been protected to the point of over population.”

“we [sic] need to have a Catch them day to thin them out.  They are everywhere.”

And, finally,

“The jewfish [the former name for goliath grouper] are eating everything.  Do your part and use a power head.  Mine is .44 mag.  Then leave them.  They won’t open the season?  Fine.”

But at least the people who don’t care for sharks have an antipathy based on some sort of personal interaction—the sharks stole one or more fish that they wanted for themselves.  In the case of goliath grouper, some seem to see them as a scourge of the sea, writing things like

“Goliath grouper are destroying all the fisheries by eating everything in sight.  They aren’t endangered, they’re overtaking all the fish population at all the wrecks and artificial reefs.  If you dive any of them, you would know that is a fact,”

And

“Goliath grouper have ruined most dive spots because they eat everything there.  Including, snapper, hogfish, grouper; basically anything they want.  They take over areas and no other species can survive.  More open days for Goliath grouper are needed.”

Which, of course, raises the question of how any of the reef fish survived prior to April 1513, when Juan Ponce de Leon first landed on the shores of what is now the Sunshine State, and began a migration of people to that region that continues yet today.  Because back then, there was virtually no one fishing for goliath grouper, except, perhaps, for a few Native Americans fishing with wooden spears and nets woven from the local vegetation, who probably didn’t put much of a dent in the population.

If the goliaths really did eat everything else in numbers sufficient to deplete the reefs, the reefs should have been just about empty by the time the Europeans arrived, but from all accounts, that wasn’t the case.  Even when I was a boy vacationing in Florida with my parents during the 1960s, I remember going down to the docks and seeing the party boats come in with loads of big snapper and grouper. 

So maybe something else is going on.

And maybe there are a lot of recreational fishermen—and I’ll include spear fishermen, too—who need to blame the goliath grouper for declining fish populations, because the only other thing they might have to blame for the decline…are themselves.

Still, I don’t want to make it sound as if it’s only Florida Man who has a dislike for marine predators.  While the folks in Florida are getting much of the press, similar attitudes prevail elsewhere.

Up in New England—and, to some extent and at some times of year, in New York and New Jersey, too—a resurgent population of seals, that are more than willing to steal a striped bass or bluefish from an angler’s line, are attracting recreational fishermen’s ire.  In May 2021, On the Water magazine published an article, “Cape Cod’s Seal Problem,” in which charter boat captain Willy Hatch complained,

“Ten years ago, we never saw seals, but now they’re everywhere.  They’re at Squibnocket Beach, Vineyard Sound, the Elizabeth Islands, Woods Hole, the Muskeget Channel.  Often, the seals hear me anchor up and set up behind my boat.  If I manage to hook a fish, a seal takes it right off my line.  It gets worse every year as their population increases and their range expands.”

His laments sound much like those of “Captain Jason,” when he was complaining about sharks.

However, unlike most angler-oriented articles on depredation, the On the Water piece tries to present a reasonably balanced view of the issue, noting that

“So many seals were bounty-hunted (or ‘nuisance killed’) or were victims of bycatch by commercial fishers that by the mid 20-th century, gray seals had been almost eliminated from U.S. waters.  Some old-timers probably remember the days when someone could go to town hall in Chatham and collect a $5 bounty per seal nose.  They were called ‘seal buttons.’  Despite this carnage, gray seals retained a breeding population in Canadian waters, while just a few hundred harbor seals survived off the coast of Maine.

“Massachusetts passed legislation to protect seals in 1965, but the big game-changer was the passage of the Marine Mammals Protection Act of 1972…The blanket protection provided by this legislation is singularly responsible for the comeback of seals in Massachusetts waters…”

So, as is the case with sharks and goliath grouper, what anglers are seeing is a predator population that is merely rebuilding to historic levels, not a population that has somehow exploded to new and unprecedented highs.

But still, there is no doubt that the increasing number of seals is causing difficulties for anglers.  The On the Water article ends in a reasonable place, observing that

“We can’t hang [the striped bass’] current problems on the seals.  As Mike Bosley [a Cape Cod charter boat operator] put it, ‘In the last 10 years, I’ve seen absolutely atrocious predation of stripers, but it’s all been by people in boats.”

But most striped bass anglers don’t take such an enlightened view; instead, they are more likely to share the sympathies of Mark Blazis, and outdoor columnist for the Worcester [MA] Telegram and Gazette, who wrote

“Cape fishermen…have come to loathe gray seals—and with good reason.  They’ve pretty much ruined much of the once-great surf fishing from Chatham all the way to P-town.  Seals scare fish away and regularly steal fish that anglers try to reel in.  If a seal can eat 11 pounds of fish a day, that’s a lot of competition for local fishermen, especially considering the thousands of seals in the commonwealth.”

Thus, in a thread titled “Seals:  Love them or Club them?” on the website Stripers Online, we see comments like

“There are way too many seals in our waters.  The numbers have gone up way too high since they became overprotected…I believe these sea mutts are eating all of our bass…”

“I guess it’s time to start harvesting them again.  Fur and meat.

“If people don’t like clubbing then something more optically humane like…shooting them in the head.”

And, from someone unconcerned with the “optically humane,”

“Club them…  They are now ‘pest’ status.”

Even birds fail to escape some anglers’ vitriol.  The May 2020 edition of The Fisherman magazine carried an article titled, “The Cormorant Threat,” in which the author argued that

“we have a large-scale problem with cormorants affecting our fisheries.”

To support his claim, he offers no hard data, nor any scientific research, but only three personal observations.  In the first, he claims that he was fishing on an eastern Connecticut sand flat when

“Many baby summer flounder are swimming on the sand, easily seen from my boat.  There are thousands of them and swimming after them and eating them are hundreds of cormorants.  They consume every baby fluke in the area.”

And perhaps they did.  Or perhaps the little fluke did what little fluke do, went down to the bottom and dove into the sand, camouflaging themselves so neither the birds nor the author could see them.  Absent a post-cormorant survey of the area, there is no way to know.

In another alleged example of cormorant predation, the author claims that he was fishing in Connecticut’s Thames River when

“We observe a flock of about 50 cormorants diving and catching small wintering striped bass (in the 12 to 15 inch range).  For several hours the birds are seen bringing striped bass to the surface and gulping them down whole.”

And maybe that’s what he really saw, although a 15-inch striped bass will weigh close to a pound and a half, so if the cormorants were gulping down fish of that size for “several hours,” they probably weren’t able to fly for couple of days.  Color me skeptical.

Although I’m not at all skeptical about his final observation, when he claims to have seen a flock of about 100 cormorants chowing down on recently stocked hatchery trout.  After all, I walk local streams in the spring helping out with a river herring survey, and I can always tell when the stocking truck has passed by, if not by the number of empty niblet corn cans scattered on the streambanks, or the amount of fishing gear suddenly tangled in streamside trees, then by the sudden appearance of not only cormorants, but ospreys, great blue herons, and great egrets in and above the water.  There’s nothing like dumping a few hundred naïve, bewildered hatchery trout into a waterway to get the various piscivorous birds excited.  Although I’ve yet to see one, I’ll bet the newly-established population of river otters appreciates the stocking, too.

Anyway, the author’s conclusion is completely predictable:

“We have a situation now where cormorants are overpopulated and have no meaningful natural predators to control their population.  While fisheries management struggles to create bag, size and seasonal limits on both recreational and commercial fishermen, a growing problem of cormorant predation on the fish stocks is not being addressed.  Any attempts by fisheries management to control cormorant populations are vehemently opposed by [the National] Audubon [Society].  There needs to be some balance here so fish stocks can be protected from the now overpopulated cormorants.”

While bottlenose dolphins, various shark species, goliath grouper, gray seals, and cormorants are very different species, recreational fishermen’s animosity toward all of them share some common threads. 

First, all of five of the species are deemed, by hostile anglers, to be “overabundant” or “overpopulated” (although Capt. Barfield was never reported to have expressed such sentiments with regard to bottlenose dolphin, other recreational fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico have; as an example, one comment on a fishing website declared that

“Dolphins worse than sharks for me.  I absolutely hate dolphins.  Last weekend of the fall season last year, I hit 11 different [fishing spots] trying to get one last limit of snapper because of fighting dolphin.”)

Anglers often believe a stock to be “overpopulated” when, in fact, a formerly depleted stock (e.g., many sharks, goliath grouper, gray and harbor seals, and possibly cormorants) are merely returning to former levels of abundance.  The “overpopulation” is not evidenced by scientific studies, but rather by the fact that the animal in question is either stealing fish off recreational fishermen’s lines, or because abundance of a target species is in decline, and increasing predator numbers offer a convenient explanation for anglers unwilling to admit that their own activities may be contributing to the diminishing numbers.

But underlying all the hostility toward predators is an overweening sense of entitlement; the attitude that the fish in the ocean exist primarily to satisfy recreational fishermen’s appetites.  Thus, if sharks and anglers compete for grouper and snapper on a Florida reef, the fact that such fish are the natural prey of local shark populations means nothing to the recreational fishermen; they want to catch those fish for their own entertainment and for personal consumption, and if any sharks get in the way of their doing so, then it is the sharks that must be removed, ocean food webs be damned.

It’s not an attitude unique to recreational fishermen.  Some hunters have the same sense of entitlement, and display it in their demands that gray wolf populations be reduced so that recreational hunters have less competition for the available elk and deer.  Some of them have adopted the mantra of “shoot, shovel, and shut up” to describe how such wolves should be treated.  Similarly, I have heard stories of hunters here in New York who, afraid that abundant coyotes might kill too many whitetail fawns and thus reduce the deer population, hang large treble hooks baited with chunks of meat from wires on their upstate properties, hoping that the coyotes will jump up and take the bait, get hooked, and end up dying slowly and painfully as they hang in the air.

Law enforcement, of course, does not approve of such efforts.

But the attitude remains.  It goes back to the days of the gamekeepers of Victorian England.  Then, of course, the people who owned the land really were entitled in fact—royalty, or at least nobility—and could get away with just about anything.  As a modern-day gamekeeper explains,

“The history of gamekeepers and their control of predators has at best been appalling, a legacy we are still paying for.  Our forefathers not only trapped, shot and poisoned any bird, or animal that was even remotely suspected of taking game, but travel back far enough and man traps were perfectly legal for poachers and trespassers alike.”

Man traps.  Something like a bear trap, but intended to do more harm.

“In our forefathers’ defense, it is simply the way things were.  Wild game was all-important and a healthy surplus was achieved by removing anything that posed a threat, there were not just keepers and warreners, but people employed solely to hunt ‘vermin.’  Payment was often for a head count and accurate records were kept and inspected, a gibbet featured on every beat and showed that the job of predator control was being carried out.

”Quite simply the gibbet was a display of every bird or animal killed to protect game.  I not only remember them well as a small boy but kept my own gibbet running for many years.  Attitudes have changed and they are no longer acceptable, but they simply reflected the hard work that a good keeper undertakes to achieve a successful season.  Different times, different attitudes, different standards.”

We don’t have man traps any more, but the gibbet lives on at shark tournaments, in the form of the rack of dead fish that sit in the sun, feeding the flies and showing off the fish that the entrants have killed.

It is time for the gibbet—the displays of dead sharks—to join man traps in the annals of time, as testaments to the arrogance of men who thought that nature existed just for their pleasure and use.  And it is well past time for recreational anglers to stop acting like arrogant hereditary lords, entitled to reshape ecosystems to serve their wants and desires.

Yes, there are predators out there.  And yes, they have evolved to feed on the same fish that anglers value.

That’s the way that nature means things to be, and only an entitled fool would seek to alter the system, validated by eons of evolution’s endless trial and error, just to suit their own personal whims.