Gill-Net Fishing: Risk to Certain Species

Only once have I seen a huge thresher shark leaping clear out of the ocean, its great sickle-shaped tail fin clearly defined. It was beautiful and awesome. That was several years before the offshore commercial gill-netters, with their mile-long nets set like a vast curtain below the sea, began to overfish them.

It was a comparatively easy matter, for the average thresher produces only one pup annually. Also, public demand for thresher shark meat seemed to be outpacing the resource.

Some career marine biologists in the State Department of Fish and Game were worried back then, and that was hardly more than five years ago. They were afraid that the thresher might become an endangered species. They were watching the catch reports closely. The resource appeared to be dwindling. Insufficient knowledge of the thresher’s habits precluded taking a firm position against overkill.

And now it has happened. The department’s report for January, 1985, through June, 1986, has just been presented by Jack C. Parnell, department director. Thresher shark landings continue to decline, according to the report. Wisely but belatedly, the department has adopted stricter regulations “which will establish a closed season to drift gill-net shark fishing for June through Aug. 15, beginning with the present 1986 season.”

Competition between the drift gill-netters and the swordfish harpoon fleet continues, with total record catches. Before the gill-netters began catching greater numbers of broadbill (and whatever else swims into their nets, such as marlin swordfish, which are strictly designated as a sportfish and not to be sold commercially), the harpooners gave up using airplanes to spot their catch. Now many of them have returned to using the spotter planes.

During 1985, Fish and Game issued 245 swordfish harpoon permits. Of these, 43 indicated their intent to use spotter aircraft as an aid to harpooning.

A total of 227 drift net permits were issued for use throughout California. And 34 experimental drift gill-net permits were issued for use north of Pt. Arguello only.

Harpooners, on their plank boats, more than doubled their landings in 1985, with 2,472 landings of broadbill. “The increased landings can likely be attributed to the aid provided by spotter aircraft,” according to the report.

Drift gill-netters for the same season reported more than 23,000 broadbill taken.

The combined landings produced a record catch of 5.2 million pounds, valued at more than $13 million.

Such efficiency, as well as inefficiency at the same time, as exhibited by the drift gill-netters does not bode well for the swordfish population. Drift gill netting began essentially as a shark fishery. They may have nearly driven the thresher shark to extinction. Will this be the fate in the next few years of the broadbill, not to mention the marlin swordfish, untold and unrecorded numbers of which are entangled indiscriminately in the long mono-filament drift gill nets set at nights?

How many more record years can the swordfish stocks withstand?

How many more, indeed, until the Department of Fish and Game, which serves essentially as a husbanding and conserving organization of our state’s natural resources, must place increasingly stricter closures and ironbound quotas on the commercial swordfish fishery? I sense that the shadow of future events is already being cast.

Must we wait until our sea has been dangerously depleted of life before we take strong measures to save it?

Swordfish and thresher sharks are only part of the problem that bears monitoring closely. There are other overharvested fish, such as the striped bass, that are also being endangered by pollution by sewerage outfalls and toxic chemicals. There also are our endangered and diminished wetlands. There are environmental problems with the sea otter, the abalone, the kelp forests, the anchovy, the sardine, the white sea bass, with seals and porpoises and whales and flying fish. . . .

The list is long and dismaying, the way of the conservationist is plodding and challenging, but, take heart, there is no more important legacy to leave to future generations than a clean and fruitful earth.