While concerned consumers fret over which fish are correct to order at their favorite seafood restaurant…the truth about commercial fishing in the United States is that a regulatory framework designed to limit overfishing results in vast numbers of fish per year being scooped up on boats and dumped right back off, dead, never consumed by any human. Concerned about “endangered” bluefin tuna? Tell it to the tuna long-liners who’ve had to cut loose untold numbers of dead bluefins in recent years, owing to the restrictions that come with winding up on the endangered-species list. A recent by-catch reduction report issued by the National Marine Fisheries Services says that “bycatch is considered to be one of the greatest threats to the sustainability of the marine environment, and bycatch affects practically every species in the ocean.”
That first dip indeed yielded a teeming bag of fish—but they were the wrong fish. We’d hit a pod of off-season summer flounder, or fluke. The regulations allowed for a certain poundage of fluke that could be kept and sold without risking fines—a tiny fraction of what we caught, less than 100 pounds. We toted up our allowance and shoveled the rest of the fish back into the brine, all dead or dying.
This was a waste of time, effort, fuel, and fish. The captain hightailed it from that piece of ocean in search of a body of whiting we could scoop up. But our regulatory bycatch frustrations were just beginning. During this three-day trip, I tallied about twenty species of edible fish and other sea creatures brought up in the net. There were more summer flounder and other out-of-season or less-desirable flatfish; there were piles upon piles of monkfish that got thrown back; and there were stone crabs, lobsters, silver eels, shad, ling cod, John Dory, menhaden, and black sea bass, which at that time were in season and had no minimum-size requirement to be brought to market. The monkfish, highly prized for their livers and status as “the poor man’s lobster,” were an especially memorable waste. I recall that we had around a 100-pound bycatch limit on the monks, and on every dip I was ruefully shoveling at least twice that amount back into the ocean.
“We’re forced to throw back so much product,” says Chuck Morici, a Montauk fisherman who plies these waters on the Act I. Gregarious and voluble, Morici was holding court at the Shagwong Restaurant in town last spring and had just returned from an especially frustrating trip where he’d thrown back thousands of those selfsame highly valuable black sea bass, a fishery that had been nearly shut down after it was found that the population had been seriously undercounted.
To put the finest of points on it: The fish Morici threw back were all dead. The waste, he says, is multifold and maddening in its scope. “We have to spend all our time recycling through all that shit just to get the quota” of the targeted species, he says. “I’m feeding the birds instead of the people. It’s insane. Nobody’s head is on the chopping block except the fishermen and the fish.”
The bycatch dilemma dovetails with a host of frustrations facing commercial fishermen these days, and Morici brings up the winter-flounder fishery as a case in point. These toothless flatfish are among the tastiest of all available fish in local waters, a once-abundant inshore species that is now limited to 50 pounds a trip to commercial fishermen. No one denies that overfishing is a factor, both commercially and recreationally. Back in the seventies, I remember marveling at photos in The Fisherman of happy anglers who’d go out in a rented skiff into one of our shallow bays and catch hundreds of unregulated flounder (today, the daily limit for recreational anglers is two fish). Morici cites an additional and more intrusive culprit: sewage and pesticide runoff from relentless coastal development. There is also the resurgence of the striped-bass fishery in New York, which may play into the demise of winter flounder, since the stripers love those fish as much as humans do, and maybe even more so.
“I'm feeding the birds instead of the people,” says a fisherman. “It's insane.”
From Gloucester, Massachusetts, to Montauk, the dock areas are filled with pickup trucks brimming with gear and sporting a bumper sticker reading NATIONAL MARINE FISHERIES SERVICE: DESTROYING FISHERMEN AND THEIR COMMUNITIES SINCE 1976.
Read the complete article from New York Magazine.