- Hi Jeff :)
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- Since the story about the herpes like virus in the lobsters
in Fla., I was intersted to note in this story that the lobster population
has gone down to almost nothing here as well!
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- During a morning fishing trip this summer, Howard Tichauer
threaded his motorboat through the Three Sisters, huge rocks that lie just
below the surface of the water off Stamford's Cummings Park Beach.
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- "You have to be a little crazy to go through here,"
he said, chuckling.
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- Or experienced. Tichauer, 74, has been fishing for six
decades. His fishing partner, Art Moe, 76, has been at it for three decades.
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- Floating on the dark water of Long Island Sound under
a slate-gray sky, they talked in a quiet, constant rhythm, comparing the
value of killifish minnows as bait to a slice of fluke belly, and warning
each other of snags.
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- "We're away from the troubles of the world,"
Tichauer said. "Out here, all you worry about is if the fish are biting."
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- But many fish are not biting, Tichauer said. Both men
say there are fewer blackfish, flounder and large bluefish, the prized
torpedo-shaped gamefish.
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- They also see fewer bait fish, such as bunker, an important
food for larger predators. Bunker returned to Greenwich Harbor this summer,
but the days of massive in-shore runs -- when thousands of bunker "would
get trapped in an inlet or harbor and die from lack of oxygen," Moe
said -- seem to be over. No one is sure why.
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- Instead of blues, Moe and Tichauer catch fluke, or summer
flounder, a flat fish that glides along the Sound's bottom, and shimmering,
pumpkin-seed shaped porgy.
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- Fishermen who gather to drink coffee each morning at
the Cummings Boat Club echo the pair's concerns, saying they have been
catching fewer of most species recently than at any time they can remember.
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- The 126-member club stopped awarding a third-place prize
in its annual flounder tournament, said Arthur Rowe, commodore of the club.
There aren't enough flounder caught to make it worthwhile.
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- "Years ago, you could come out here and catch buckets
full of flounder, but not anymore," Tichauer said. "Those days
are gone."
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- Dick Harris, a director for Westport-based HarborWatch/RiverWatch,
also has seen a decline in fish in local harbors, which are nurseries for
many species.
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- For a dozen years, Harris' group has trawled Norwalk
Harbor and Saugatuck Harbor, counting fish species and populations. The
catch has dropped from a dozen or more species just a few years ago to
two or three in recent years, Harris said.
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- Part of the decline may be due to rising numbers of cormorants,
diving birds that prey on small fish, Harris said. But even the number
and variety of crabs has declined, he said.
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- "There are many, many areas where there is nothing,"
he said. "There is something drastically wrong here. I think this
is lost on the public."
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- A good sign?
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- Science also suggests something is happening to the fish.
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- For example, the National Marine Fisheries Service estimated
that up to 6 million bluefish were caught in Connecticut waters during
some years in the late 1980s; by the late 1990s, the bluefish haul had
dropped below 1 million. Winter flounder also have plunged from catches
of 1 million to a low of 20,000 during the same period.
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- But the catch of striped bass, another important game
fish in the Sound, has skyrocketed. Decimated by overfishing, only 2,000
stripers were caught in 1986, by the fisheries service estimates. Fifteen
years later, after a concerted conservation effort, more than a million
were caught. Scup also are appearing in record numbers.
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- No one knows for sure whether these population shifts
mark ecological changes in the Sound, or merely normal cycles of abundance.
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- Researchers have been trying to get a better idea of
what's happening from the deck of the John Dempsey, a 50-foot-long state
Department of Environmental Protection research ship that travels the Sound
dragging nets in 200 places to see which species are flourishing -- and
which are in trouble.
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- During a trip on the Dempsey last spring, Kurt Gottschall,
who oversees the survey, swung the net over the deck and pulled the cord
to open it, spilling fish over the aluminum sorting table.
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- Butterfish, Atlantic herring, flounder and striped bass
poured from the net. Sometimes the net yields rarer species that wander
into the Sound. For the first time in its 20-year history, the trawl caught
a few cod this year, Gottschall said. Once the most economically important
fish of the North Atlantic, cod numbers crashed after centuries of overfishing.
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- "I don't know if it is a good sign or not,"
Gottschall said, "but we have never seen them before."
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- Although counts for some species are lower and the lobster
population has collapsed, many fish species are doing very well, said Gottschall.
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- In the early 1990s, the DEP used a net with a fine mesh
to evaluate some species of feed fish. They caught as many as 38,000 herring
in a single tow of the net, he said.
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- "A lot of people don't realize that Long Island
Sound is just loaded with Atlantic herring," he said.
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- Clear answers
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- Part of what's happening with fish in the Sound has clear
answers. The number of striped bass has risen due to stringent quotas and
size minimums, as well as reductions in certain chemicals, such as PCBs
and DDT.
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- The low number of bluefish in recent years also may contribute
to an increase in striped bass, Gottschall said. Often, when numbers of
one large predatory fish species drops, the other rises because they compete
for similar foods.
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- Bluefish also might be poised for a comeback as researchers
have seen more year-old blues, known as "snappers," appearing
this year, Gottschall said. The porgy population also is healthy, and more
fluke were caught in the survey's net last year than at any time in the
last decade.
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- But scientists say it's difficult to figure out exactly
what is happening in the Sound overall because there are so many species
and little is known about some of them, biologists said.
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- Ocean pout, an eel-like fish, lives in the Sound for
much of the year, but disappears in the summer and fall. "We just
don't know where they go when they leave," Gottschall said.
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- Another question is why the number of sea robins, bottom-dwelling
fish armed with sharp spines on broad, sail-like fins, are rising so noticeably.
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- "It's a Soundwide phenomena, a Soundwide increase,"
said David Simpson, a supervising fisheries biologist with the DEP.
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- The bunker, or menhaden, which once gathered in great
schools off the coasts of Norwalk, Stamford and Greenwich, are another
mystery. "It's been years and years since we had really good numbers
of menhaden in the Sound," Simpson said.
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- Bunker boats, large commercial fishing trawlers that
scoop up big schools of menhaden, have been blamed for their disappearance.
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- But Simpson said overfishing in the Sound, which bunker
boats rarely entered before they were banned from Connecticut waters in
1999, is probably not the cause.
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- "I think the issue there was simply local short-term
depletion," he said.
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- Off-shore impact
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- Off-shore influences, such as commercial fishing beyond
the Sound, may be causing the decline in some species, particularly bluefish,
which migrate to deep water in winter, Simpson said.
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- "These things live broadly across the Atlantic Ocean,"
he said. "Most of the factors are regional in nature; (it depends
on) how big is the coastwide stock."
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- Along the Atlantic coast, the bluefish haul has dwindled
from a high of 31 million fish in 1981 to 15 million last year, according
to the National Marine Fisheries Service.
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- In general, the populations of most fish in the United
States and worldwide are in pretty bad shape, according to two studies
published this summer.
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- "Our best assessment was that overfishing was the
biggest problem," said Chris Mann, coastal policy director for the
Pew Oceans Commission, which published one of the studies.
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- The commission called for fish populations to be managed
jointly by state and federal agencies.
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- "These stocks are migratory, and it has been a real
challenge to try to manage them," Mann said.
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- One of the factors many blame for the demise of the lobster
-- rising water temperatures -- also could be having an effect on some
species, especially cold-water ones such as the winter flounder.
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- "The winter flounder hasn't attracted much attention,
probably because it's at the southernmost part of its range," said
Alistair Dove, senior research assistant at Cornell University's College
of Veterinary Medicine. "But it has declined very disturbingly and
should be of concern to anyone who cares about marine (health)."
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- Too clean for fish?
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- Art Glowka, chairman of Stamford's Shellfish Commission,
believes that the bluefish problem can be traced back to a lack of small
fish in the Sound.
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- Striped bass, said Glowka, an avid fisherman, eat almost
anything, which may be why they are faring better. Bluefish, on the other
hand, hunt other, smaller fish such as bunker, attacking them with speed
and sharp teeth.
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- The decreased numbers of bunker may be due to water-quality
improvements, especially the reduction of nitrogen in sewage outflows through
the upgrading of treatment plants, Glowka said.
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- His opinion contradicts the belief by state and federal
researchers that reducing nitrogen will improve fish stocks. Nitrogen,
a fertilizer, is blamed for fostering blooms of algae that are consumed
by bacteria when they die, creating oxygenless dead zones in the Sound.
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- "Certainly there is still an abundance of nutrients
in the western Long Island Sound," said Simpson. "We are still
a long way from starving out the plankton."
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- But Glowka reasons that by decreasing nitrogen, beneficial
algae and other Long Island Sound plants may be starving, leading to a
drop in food for bait fish.
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- His evidence? Thin bluefish and striped bass whose stomachs
are full of sand shrimp and other insubstantial food, he said.
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- Glowka is not alone in arguing that the cleanup of nitrogen
in estuaries may lead to a decline in fish populations.
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- Alan Mearns, a Seattle-based senior scientist with the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, asks some of the same
questions Glowka does in an opinion article entitled "Too Clean for
the Fish?"
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- Co-authored with two other scientists and published in
the Seattle Times in 1998, the article argues that removing nutrients from
sewage could harm fish populations in some cases. In California, the number
of fish around sewage plants dropped when nitrogen was reduced.
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- "A lot of agencies are selling improved treatment
with the idea that it is going to bring back the fish," Mearns said
in a telephone interview. "It may not."
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- Government officials and scientists must focus on an
ecosystem-based management strategy, including studies of past fishing
records, Mearns said.
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- Bill Matuszeski, recently retired director of the federal
Environmental Protection Agency's Chesapeake Bay Program, also criticized
the way the government has tackled restoration of the Sound.
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- Nitrogen pollution is certainly the greatest problem
facing Long Island Sound, he said. But not enough has been done to institute
ecological goals that people care about -- such as increasing fish stocks
-- in addition to the dry, technical goal of reducing nitrogen.
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- "I think the question is how you sell it, and it
is hard to sell it if all you talk about is nitrogen reduction," Matuszeski
said. "It's hard to get people excited about nutrients."
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- Petition for marine life
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- Glowka and a group of about 10 fishermen have filed a
petition asking the National Marine Fisheries Service to list cunner, a
fish that lives along rocky shores, and winter flounder in western Long
Island Sound as threatened or endangered under the federal Endangered Species
Act of 1973.
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- It has become rare to catch either species, which Glowka
says are indicators of water productivity and health, in what he calls
the western Sound -- the estuary between Norwalk and Manhattan.
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- Pat Scida, a fisheries biologist with the agency, said
the evidence presented with Glowka's petition is being studied. If reason
is found to consider listing the species, the health of their population
will be examined over the next year, Scida said.
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- Glowka's belief, which Simpson does not share, that the
western Sound is a biologically separate ecosystem from the rest of the
estuary may come into play in the petition decision.
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- "One of the criteria, if something deserves protection
under the Endangered Species Act, is it has to meet the criteria of a species
or a distinct population segment," Scida said.
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