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| Territorial Shifts by Local Fish Stocks |
Jerry Vovcsko
Posted: Thu, November 05, 2009
So the long-despised Yankees are the World Champions of baseball and former Red Sox outfielder helped drive the stake into the Phillies with timely hitting and scintillating legwork on the bases. The New England Patriots had a bye week so local football fans seemed a bit restless last Sunday. And pass-rusher Jarvis will be for two to four weeks from his recent arthroscopic surgery to clean out his aching knee joint. The Celtics still smart over last year’s title going to those LA show-boaters, the Lakers, and the Bruins, well, what can one say about the original trick or treaters except “expect the worst?” In other words, things are looking pretty dismal in New England Sports Nation these days.
But we console ourselves that we can always count on next spring to bring the striped bass and bluefish back our way and we know that come summer, the fishing will be pretty darned good in fresh and salt water alike. But now we hear that fish stocks have been shifting further and further north in what appears to be a climate-related move to find coolers waters. National Marine Fisheries scientists in Woods Hole have been studying these fish populations for decades and their conclusions are disturbing. The NMFS researchers noticed that 24 of the 36 stocks they’ve been watching had changes in distribution consistent with warming ocean temperatures. Ten of the 36 stocks had significantly expanded their territory, and 12 had reduced it. Seventeen stocks moved to deeper waters to find cooler temperatures. Overfishing can also shrink the area that fish occupy, and so researchers looked at species, like blackbelly rosefish, that aren't targeted by commercial fishermen. From the 1960s through to the early 1990s, the greatest concentrations of rosefish were found in deep waters off the southern New England coastline. But from the mid-1990s to the present day, that population has shifted hundreds of miles to the northeast to deep waters off Georges Bank. Cod and haddock, two commercially valuable local species also shifted north, although the distance was much smaller than rosefish. Said to be a broad overview, the logical next step for the study will be to pick five species and look at them more closely.
Those results should be troublesome to all concerned as changes of that magnitude to not typically bode well for the creatures (including humans) affected by the shifts. It’s long past time to set aside arguments over global warming and begin to look at the fisheries with an eye toward conserving fish stocks rather than fighting over allocation of resources. If we don’t we may soon find that we are arguing about how to divide non-existent numbers of fish. Nobody knows for a certainty where we stand on the continuum of “plenty of fish” at one end versus “species extinction” on the other. But with that in mind we probably need to err on the side of a conservative approach to the problem, if, that is, we hope to leave the resource in good shape for our children and grandchildren. I am a grandfather five times over and I would like to see my kids and their kids able to derive the same pleasure from a lifetime of fishing as I experienced It just might be time to take seriously some of the changes we are seeing and begin to do our part to make things better before it’s too late and we lose the opportunity to ensure a bright future for the next generation of anglers.
Meanwhile, on the local scene it’s getting down toward the season’s end right now. The leaves are gone and the fish are not far behind, at least as far as the striped bass are concerned. The bulk of the fall migration has moved on, most of the Big Boys are on their way south as are those large pods of bass such as the ones that transit the Canal in mid to late October. But that doesn’t mean they’re all gone leaving a watery desert behind. Yes, fish are scarce at this time but that just means fishermen have to work harder to find them. For one thing, the estuaries, rivers and streams become targets of opportunity now. Poking around up in the shallows of the Cape’s stream and rivers can be very rewarding pretty much anytime but especially so in the late fall. The argument about winter-over versus newly emerging local populations of stripers cranks up once again as winter approaches; I don’t know who’s right in that argument but I do know there are bass around the year around…and they can be caught. Smaller lures, slow tempo, fresh baits…those are all factors that determine success in the late season. And perhaps the most important determinant in who catches fish in December and who doesn’t is a simple formula: Success = whoever’s out there the most putting in the time in good weather or bad.
Not too complicated an equation after all.
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