Article by Capt. Mark Sampson
Natural Selection
The other day I was pondering about some of the fish that used to be, but are no longer so very abundant off our coast and back bay waters. Big bluefish, Atlantic mackerel, sea trout, croaker, spadefish, lingcod, codfish, blowfish just to name a few. Sure, some of these fish are still caught around Delmarva, but in nowhere near the numbers or the sizes they used to be. What happened?
Sea trout, bluefish and croaker are pretty good examples of what I'm getting at here. We used to catch the heck out of big ones; 4-8 pound trout, 8-18 pound bluefish, and filling a cooler with 2-pound croaker was pretty common. The crazy thing is that local anglers are still catching plenty of those fish but, with few exceptions, they're all small, and in the case of the trout and croaker, they're not just sub-legal small - they're "tiny" small! And unless things have changed out there, I'm pretty sure that little fish still come from big fish which means that the big fish have to be somewhere. But where?
All that brought to mind an African myth about an elephant graveyard where old elephants go when they're about to kick the bucket, the anthill, or whatever it is they kick after a long blissful life of chasing lions and stomping pygmies. Apparently his myth came to be many years ago when ivory hunting was big business and, as you can imagine, if someone were to find this "graveyard" they'd make a quick easy fortune in elephant tusks without so much concern about becoming a Serengeti pizza by an angry pachyderm!
Around the world there are other myths and facts about animals that gather together in mind boggling numbers, and when you think about it, if most of any one type of critter is bunched up in one place then the other place or places where they should be - they probably aren't.
With all the fancy hi-tech gadgets screwed to our boat these days, some of which can pretty much help you find a minnow in a hurricane, you'd think that by now someone would have discovered where the mother-load of these fish have been hiding for the last decade or so - but apparently not! Or at least if they have, that information must be known only to a coalition of fishermen who are able to keep their knowledge about their super secret stash of fish well among their own ranks. (We've gotta find those guys! Hummmmm - maybe start with some tournament winners?)
But when you think about it, if there is such a place where ALL the big fish are hiding out in mass as they wait for us humanoids to forget they ever existed, running above them in a boat should light up a skipper's depth finder screen so much that it should appear that the boat is about to run over mount Everest.
“Yikes Skipper, turn the boat around! We're about to strike bottom”!
“No way Gilligan, that can't be the bottom, we're 80-miles offshore.”
“Doesn't matter. Look at the screen, we're coming up on some kind of huge underwater blob of something. Spin'er around and let's get out of here"!!
Maybe these days we're just relying too much on our electronics to tell us where to go, so that when an event happens that the tiny pea-brain circuit boards programmed by some dude sitting in a valley in the middle of China didn't anticipate, we just let the plastic boxes steer us away from the mother load of fish every angler dreams of!
If Darwin had it right when he suggested that the fittest and the “smartest” species will survive, it could lend credence to my own warped theory that all the big fish have banded together someplace where we can't find them. At least to me it makes sense that it would be the big dumb ones that would have been caught up first, and therefore eliminated from the gene pool thus leaving the smart ones behind who would know how to avoid the hooks, nets, traps, boats and anything else that would betray their presence and eventually lead to their demise in the bottom of someone's Yeti. After that it's all genetics as the bluefish, mackerel, croaker and other Einstein species pass their twisted strands of DNA stuff on to the next generation of "smart fish".
Traditionally, fishery managers have applied statistics to catch reports, surveys, observations, and a whole slew of other tricks they keep up their sleeves to estimate how many fish are out there before translating all the confusion into numbers that they think depict the amount of fish close enough for them to conclude what fishermen can take each season. Hardly an exact science, but that's the way it's done.
So here's my thought... perhaps someone should consider applying the “elephant graveyard theory" to fishery management. Remember, all those little fish out there have to be coming from somewhere. So if the brainiacs are only counting the little fish that anglers are encountering, perhaps only the tip of the iceberg is showing up on their balance sheets. That huge mass of big “smart” fish might be out there swirling around in the Bermuda triangle, under the polar icecap or some other offshore hidey hole pumping out little fish uninterrupted by fishermen save for the occasional tournament angler who plucks one of their kind out of the big fish bowl and then hightails it out back to the dock before someone gets wise to their secret spot - or the tournament scales close.
Yeah, as far as I'm concerned the answer to what we need to find out is not "how many fish are out there and what regulations are needed to bring their numbers back", but simply "where are they, and what's it going to take to catch’em?"
And if someone in fisheries wants to come up with a regulation to do something about it, maybe they should let natural selection work for us by developing an IQ test that fishermen can give to the fish so that they can release the dumb ones and kill the smart ones! Guess that’s like a lot of other fishermen who suddenly realize that they've lived long enough to be older than the dirt that clings to the wheels of their trucks, I'm increasingly compelled to relay "back in the day” stories to anyone willing to hold still long enough to hear my long-winded rants about how things used to be back when men were men, women were women, and even though we didn't know the sex of the fish we were catching, they were always bigger, more abundant, closer to shore, and certainly hungrier than what's been swimming about Delmarva's inshore and offshore waters the last couple decades.
We all know that, over time and for better or worse, things change in the watery ecosystem where we send our baits and lures. Some of these changes are what fishermen might consider “good” and while others maybe “not so much”. Fish that were here back in the day - just aren't anymore. Good would be the numbers of tuna being taken during much of the late spring and most of the summer months. Not so good would be the recent lack of tuna at the end of summer and early fall. Good would be the great deep water fishing for tilefish and offshore reef fishing for sea bass, tog, and flounder. Not so good would be how challenging it has become to pull off a decent catch of bottom fish on the nearshore wrecks and reefs inside of ten or so miles from the inlet.
Also, not so good is the disappearance of a lot of fish that used to be staples. §
