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.