Every now and then we all take a look backward with longing at what we remember as a better time. Back then we were younger there were not so many regulations and fish just jumped right into the boat or so my father told me. The water was pure, air clean and the sea held all the fish that anyone could want – all there for the taking. Since it is impossible to attach numbers to myth or feelings surveys are needed to determine the health of the environment and fish stocks.

If you’ve lived on the Coast for more than a few years you’ve seen both commercial and recreational fishing under go some significant changes. For various species and types of fishing there have been increases in length limits, decreases in number allowed, changes in gear types, area restrictions, seasonal closures, turtle and fish excluder devices and closed areas.

Every summer the oyster beds are closed due to sewage pollution. There is mercury in our fish, the price of seafood goes up, imported seafood is under cutting our commercial fleets and when we charter a boat for half a month’s rent only to throw back nearly all the fish we catch because their too small to keep.

If you have experienced some or all of this then you have probably realized that the ocean’s fishery resources are not infinite.

The Gulf Coast is not alone in its marine resource related problems. The cod fishery in the north Atlantic was closed over 12 years ago and will be closed for another 20 years due to over-fishing. Alaskan salmon runs are down 40% to 60% over the last 20 years. The red snapper season in the Gulf seems close earlier each year. The fish we see in our markets are smaller and are not available for as long. Will there be seafood in 20 years and what kind?

Fishing has changed rapidly in the twentieth century especially after WWII. During that war fishing was curtailed all over the globe especially in the Atlantic. When the war was over recreational and commercial fishing expanded rapidly.

Nations like the Japan and Russia developed large trans-global distant water fleets of trawlers, long liners, deep-water crabbers and purse seine vessels. Japan, which spent decades collecting oceanographic data, developed new and innovative fishing methods and equipment that greatly increased their catch.

There is no planet wide agency that manages and enforces international fishing regulations with any great effect. The United Nations and organizations like the International Committee for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) make motions in that direction but nothing is being done that has any real effect.

The United States has its fishery management councils with their regulations and 200-mile limits but it is a big planet. The bottom line is that a constantly expanding human race is taking more than a finite resource can provide.

Aquaculture has and is being touted as a way to fill the gap between the fish that we want and the fish our oceans can provide. Farmers know it is easier and more profitable to “raise deer than wolves“ which are lower on the food chain and require less intensive care. Fish like mullet, tilapia and the carps (which have been cultured for centuries) will start to fill this gap over the coming years.

When and if the stocks now under increasingly strict regulation recover there will never be enough fish to supply our markets like they did in the past without risking a protracted collapse.

Think Global – Act Local!

People have been fishing just for the fun-of-it for the last several centuries. An English gentleman would spend hours tying the perfect fly in an attempt to fool Atlantic salmon. As children we would go out at night with a tin can and a flashlight rapped in yellow plastic to collect night crawlers. The next day we would go out to the banks of a pond or stream with a stick, hook, six feet of monofilament and our best friend to see if we could catch something. Anything would do, just as long as it was a fish that we could brag to our friends about or use to scare the girl next door.

In the thousands of years before these gentler times fishing was used to help us survival. American Indians would use wooden trident spears and stalk trout shallow pools. They used basket traps and spears to catch salmon as they made their run up the rapids to spawn and die. One thing that never occurred to any of us at least or at least most of us, until the second half of the twentieth century, or at any stage in our fishing history for that matter was that there would not be enough fish to go around.

Methods of dealing with an excess of hunting and fishing effort have been around for a while. Some that we are familiar with along the Gulf Coast include; closed seasons, closed areas, limits on the number you are allowed to catch and length limits. In other areas of the United States there are gear restrictions which include fly fishing only, barbless hooks, no treble hooks, artificial lures only, no night fishing, row boats only, no traps, no multi-hook gear and no snagging. One way that is commonly used in hunting is license limitation.

As an example, in some western states if you want to hunt elk you apply for a permit. Your name is put into a lottery and if it is drawn you get to purchase a permit and you are then allowed to hunt that season. The permits are expensive and there is still no guarantee that you will bag an elk. About three people in ten who apply for a permit have their name drawn and the application fee is non-refundable. In one state you are allowed only one permit every ten years, they are non-transferable and cannot be sold. Why all these restrictions? There is too much effort and not enough game to go around.

To my knowledge this type license limitation strategy has not been apply to marine recreational or commercial fishing. Looking at the increase in marine recreational and commercial fishing regulations and restrictions over the last twenty years it is only a matter of time before this proven concept is apply to marine waters. It can be applied in many ways, for example, by lottery you get to fish only every other month, this includes catch and release, if your name is not drawn in the lottery you do not get to fish that year, and only people with last names ending in A through L are allowed to fish this year then M through Z the next.

Some of the advantages of these types of license restrictions are that those who get to fish are allowed higher bag limits with fewer restrictions, favorite fishing spots are not crowded and over-fished species recover faster. The disadvantage is that you do not get to fish anytime that you feel like it. Commercial salmon fishing licenses in Alaska are a commodity and if you have one it can be sold, leased or traded to the highest bidder. We should all remember that fishing is a privilege not a right.

We this type of ˜limitation” has been applied in many other arenas of the human experience all over the globe for centuries. There are close to 6.8 billion humans on the planet all wanting the best for their families and themselves.
The earth’s resources are finite and we are quickly reaching the end easily retrieved items like gas and oil. During WWII there were meatless days of the week in order to conserve protein for the troops. It is not too wild an imaging to say that in the not so distant future that there will be electricity-less days of the week and a year without fishing.

Think Global – Act Local!

Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, sprang from the sea on an oyster shell and bore Eros, thus the word “aphrodisiac” was born. In later centuries, the great lover Casanova was said to start a meal by eating twelve dozen oysters to ready him for the night’s pleasures.

In the fossil record oysters appeared during the Triassic period about 200 million years ago and have been an important food source for man since the new Stone Age.

The Chinese have raised oysters in ponds for centuries. In 320 B.C. Aristotle speculated in his writing of the ‘Historia Animalium’ that oysters were spontaneously generated from slime. At that time the Greeks served them with wine and the Romans loved then so much that they sent thousands of slaves to the English Channel to collect them. Some Roman emperors were said to pay for them, ounce for ounce, in gold.

The oyster we have in Alabama is the eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica). They are filter feeders and consume algae and other water borne foods by filtering water at a rate of up to five liters per hour. When the oyster beds were in their natural untouched state scientists believe that Mobile Bay’s oysters served as a natural water filtering system that turned over the volume of the bay every few days.

The oysters are collected from their beds on the oyster reefs with manually operated tongs. The oystermen work the reefs in small boats, measure the shells for legal size, bag them and haul them into shore.

The eastern oyster usually lives in water between 8 and 25 feet. Oysters start spawning in the spring when the water temperature rises above a certain level and again in the early fall when it falls below that point. This triggers a chain reaction of spawning, which clouds the water with hundreds of millions of eggs and sperm. Their free-swimming larvae are called spat which settle on any hard substrate, but they prefer oyster shells. Oysters are hermaphrodites, which change sex when there isn’t enough of the opposite sex around to provide for enough spawn.

Oysters mature at an early age (one year). A single female oyster produces 10 to 100 million eggs annually. Over time, as the oysters live and die their shells from reefs with many nooks and crannies that have fifty times the surface area of flat bottom. These reefs provide habitat for a wide range of animals like worms, snails, juvenile crabs, and fish.

A common rule of thumb has been to eat oysters only in months that have an “R” in their name. This was during cold weather that prevented spoilage. With refrigeration the danger of decay and food poisoning has been all but eliminated. In ‘non-R’ months oyster tend to be on the flaccid side because they have spent all their stored energy on spawning.

Because oysters are filter feeders they take in, along with their food, whatever else is in the water. Because of septic tanks, sewage overflows and runoff from farms the health department closes the oyster reefs when the fecal coliform count gets too high.

Hurricanes scour the reefs with their strong currents and wipe off any oysters along with the old shell that is need for the oyster larvae to settle on. These two factors have resulted in highly variable production. From 1950 to 2005 commercial oyster harvest ranged from two million pounds of meat in 1950 to 11 thousand pounds in 1989.

Mariculture of oysters had been going on for centuries. In the last 30 years it has intensified to keep up with the increasing demand and the unstable and declining natural harvest.

With increased concerns over contamination, uncertain availability and environmental decline the future of the commercial oyster fishery is uncertain. There will always be a local natural harvest fresh market. But, if these trends are not reversed mariculture of the oyster with replace the large-scale natural harvest in the coming years.

Think Global – Act Local!

There are two general types of shrimp fishing, the inshore and the offshore. In Alabama inshore fishery is composed of smaller boats which work from the I-10 freeway down the ship channel past Dog and Fowl Rivers to the intra-coastal water way and the mouth of Mobile Bay. They work west into Mississippi Sound, east past Oyster and Wolf Bays and up the Perdido system to black water. The offshore fishery ranges from the US-Mexico boarder to Key West and many miles out into the Gulf. As events over the last 30 years will attest things are changing in Gulf Coast.  Our population especially in the coastal areas has increased greatly.

The pressures on our marine environment have increased along with the population. Not only are commercial shrimpers using the marine waters, but recreational boaters and anglers, crabbers and gill-netters are out there too. House developments and condos are rapidly covering up coastal land and adding their share of pollution the aquatic ecosystem. We tend to view our local communities on the Gulf Coast as isolated from the events taking place around the world – perhaps, years ago that was true but not anymore.

According to NFMS information only 26% of the shrimp eaten in the America come from US waters. Global shrimp farming along, with capture fisheries are producing shrimp at prices on the world and local markets that the US commercial shrimp industry is having a hard time competing against. State and Federal regulations that restrict what type of gear can be used, when and where, plus Turtle Excluder Devices (TED) and By-catch Reduction Devices (BRD) are impacting the catch. What kind of future is in store for the shrimp fleet?

Commercial shrimping is dependent on a product from the sea that is not predictable, never controllable and constantly argued and fought over. With a global marketplace, intensive worldwide shrimp farming, rapid transportation of products, increasing labor and fuel costs and concerns about how the act of shrimping itself affects the Gulf’s marine environment, shrimping is looked upon as having a very challenging if not problematic future.

Due the reduction in wholesale prices caused by imported shrimp there will probably be a decline in offshore shrimping with a concomitant increase in the inshore component due to lower operating costs. Both real and perceived conflicts with environment groups will continue to impinge on the shrimpers’ ability to make a living, especially if the inshore component of the fishery increases. No matter what happens in the future a fresh product should be available to local customers.

The Gulf of Mexico shrimp fisheries has been part of us for over 200 years and during that time it has met and endured many challenges.

The latest challenge is how can the richest country in the world’s shrimp fishery successfully compete against pond-raised shrimp from all over the world and greatly increased operating costs?

Think Global – Act Local!

Red snapper are and have been a species of interest to this fishery. That is not to say Grays, Vermilions, Yellowtails, Lanes, triggerfish and amberjacks aren’t important.
Recreational saltwater fishing started to come into its own in the 1950s around the nation and has continued to grow with the passage of time.

In the 1970’s a radio navigation system called Loran “A” was made available to fishermen. Anglers were no longer limited to line-of-sight triangulation to fixed shore positions. This enabled them to return to the exact same successful fishing spot time after time. Loran “A” evolved into Loran “C” which offered increased precision and accuracy. Finally the global positioning system, which utilizes satellites, came along and is accurate to within five feet, time after time.These electronic developments and others greatly accelerated the expansion of charter fishing right on into the 1990’s.

Another factor that aided the development of charterboat fishing was the recognition that bottom structure attracted and held fish. Early in the history of the fishery anglers knew that they would find red snapper around exposed rock outcroppings and sunken vessels. Rather that run many miles out into the Gulf to try and find one of these sites they began making their own bottom structure near shore.

Charter boat captains would take old car bodies or most anything else that would stay in one place on the bottom out into the Gulf during the off season and covertly sink it. They were sunk covertly because at that time it was against the law. This later evolved into a legally approved system for individuals to create artificial reefs in approved areas of the Gulf off Alabama. The ‘Rigs to Reefs’ program was another way to make more structure in the Gulf. Old oilrig platforms were floated over to approved areas from Louisiana or Mississippi and sunk.

The old way of thinking about the ocean was to view it as an endless sea of fish and this was soon put to rest as landings of red snapper and other species began to decline from over fishing. In an effort to manage the fisheries of the United States on a sustainable basis, the Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976, (renamed the.

Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act when amended on October 11, 1996) established a U.S. exclusive economic zone that ranges between three and 200 miles offshore and created eight regional fishery councils to manage the living marine resources within that area. This Act was passed principally to address heavy foreign fishing, promote the development of a domestic fishing fleet and link the fishing community more directly to the management process.

Members of the Gulf of’ Mexico Fisheries Management Council include the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), United States’ Fish and Wildlife Service, all the Gulf States, commercial and recreational interests. The council convenes scientific panels composed of qualified state, federal and academic personnel to look at the economic, social and biological status of all species under its management.

Because Alabama has the largest artificial reef zone in the U.S. off its shores (1200 square miles) which supports a large charter boat fleet, a bone of contention from the recreational sector has been that it should be managed separately. Reasons to support this effort include the contention that artificial reefs not only attract red snapper but they also help to produce more fish by creating hard bottom where none existed before.

Another point that all sectors of the fishery seem to have a problem with in the red snapper management plan is that the recovery goal is set too high and that it should be lowered allowing for increased quotas and length limits sooner than planned.

In 2007 the Gulf Council reduced the number of red snapper a recreational angler is allowed to catch on each fishing trip from four to two. The limit may be further reduced to one fish per person in the next two years if recovery in the fishery is not detected. Given the seasonal availability associated with other species caught by the charterboats and their increasingly restrictive regulations, it is not surprising that some captains around the Gulf are turning to other ways of making a living on the water.
Dolphin cruises are popular with tourists and keep the boat earning. There are even some shrimping / ecological cruises where paying passengers are taken out shrimping in the bays and bayous.

The ecology of the area is explained with identification of birds, mammals and other fauna provided. Animals caught in the trawls are identified and the passengers get to keep the shrimp, crabs and whatever comes up that the law allows.

With the ongoing increases in fuel costs, maintenance and restrictive regulations the next ten years will be a challenge for the charterboat fishery in the Gulf of Mexico. The challenge will be not to increase their presence or even to maintain their presence but rather to survive as a component of the fishery.

Think Global – Act Local!