The Gladdings' choice to forsake the more profitable grouper was a strategic move in another way. For commercial fishermen like the Gladdings, fishing has become less about bait, tides and moons and more about angling to secure an economic future on the increasingly regulated seas.
Their weather eye tells them the government may soon dictate not only how many pounds of each kind of fish can be caught collectively, but also will spell out -- via quotas -- which fishermen will catch how much individually. By fishing hard for kingfish now, the Gladdings hope to win a good-sized quota allotment if new rules go into effect.
Driving the Gladdings' calculations is the fact that, simply put, we're running out of fish.
Domestic seafood consumption is up by some 112 million pounds in the last decade. (Omega 3 anyone?) Recreational fishing is up, with 20 million trips a year in Florida, much of it in the Keys, where 28,000 recreational boats are registered. Meanwhile, commercial vessels, thanks to sophisticated navigational equipment and other tools, have quadrupled their ability to catch. Saltwater fishing has become a $6-billion industry in the state.
All that fishing has consequences. Thirteen of 16 grouper species are over-fished in the Keys, as are seven of 13 snapper species. In all, says the University of Miami's Jerald Ault, 70% of the exploitable Keys species -- fish for which there's a market -- are overfished. Seafood lovers and fishermen move on to the next species as one is fished out, creating a rolling recession in fish populations.
What's left tends to be an "MTV generation" of fish -- younger, smaller, sexually mature, but not much for procreation. Consider: The average black grouper taken 70 years ago was 22.5 pounds, compared with 9 pounds today.
Ault calls it the fishing equivalent of clear-cutting. The technical term for the slide toward smaller fish is "juvenescence." And age matters: One 10-year-old red snapper produces as many eggs -- 9 million -- as 212 snappers that are 2 to 4 years old, says James A. Bohnsack of the National Marine Fisheries Service in Miami.
Meanwhile, what fishing pressure isn't doing to fish populations, habitat degradation is. When juvenile fish follow nature's elegant choreography to the place most suited to their maturing, they may find concrete rather than mangrove roots or water too packed with nutrient runoff or a salt level radically different from what nature intended, thanks to artificially created freshwater flows.
The Gladdings, who together net $70,000 a year, have no intention of sitting on the dock of the bay watching their livelihood roll away. Like many fishermen, they expect that sooner or later kingfish and other species will be privatized under individual quotas -- government-awarded sole ownership rights to catch fish on a species-by-species basis.
Currently, the federal government generally manages fish populations by regulating "total allowable catch" -- that is, how much all fishermen can take out collectively. For example, 3.39 million pounds of king mackerel can be taken from the Gulf; for red snapper, the figure is 4.65 million pounds.
The rules create distortions in supply. As soon as the season opens, fishermen rush, derby-style, to catch as many fish as possible before the overall quota is met. The scramble often keeps them at sea in dangerous weather and drives down the dockside price when they all return with their catches at about the same time.
Individual quotas would give individual fishermen the right to take a set number of fish any time of the year, allowing them to pick their weather and price point and providing an incentive to turn in poachers. Quotas typically are set according to individual vessels' historic catch records -- which is what's prompting the Gladdings to fish hard now so they can fish at all later.
Such a system also has implications, however, judging by limited U.S. experience. For the initial recipients, it can be a windfall. But the only way newcomers can enter or quota-holders can expand is to buy a quota from an existing holder, just as at present with the finite number of government permits to commercially take lobster in Florida. Without Byzantine rules on how much quota one can amass, quotas in the long run may ensure only that the mom-and-pops get solid financial buyouts as bigger businesses and absentee owners take over their industry.
Giving Fish a Break
A four-year congressional ban on new individual quotas expires in October. Federal fish managers want the power to use them. New England fishermen strongly oppose such quotas, and their representatives hold important committee posts in Congress. But it became clear in a recent round of hearings that Southern "stakeholders" -- commercial and recreational fishermen and state regulators -- don't share the New Englanders' opposition. A likely compromise could follow the recommendations of a congressionally ordered National Research Council study: Give fish managers the power to implement them on a region-by-region basis.
Meanwhile, regulators use other tools. The Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary wants to shut a total of 185 square nautical miles in the rich fishing territory around the Tortugas, including Sherwood Forest, an underwater coral paradise and spawning ground that shows why the Keys reefs are Florida's Yellowstone. The closure would double the "no-take" zone in the sanctuary. And the federal government wants to double the zone again by 2010 to meet its goal of setting aside 20% of all U.S. coral reefs.
The government expects that the loss of additional fishing areas will be more than offset by better fishing outside the closed areas as fish propagate and move out. "We'll see more snapper and grouper," says sanctuary superintendent Billy Causey. "I think people will see this is a type of tool that should have been in place much longer ago."
As the nation sails toward more regulation and as fish populations struggle, it's no surprise some commercial fishermen look for an exit strategy. Don DeMaria of Summerland Key, who took up commercial fishing in the Keys in 1978, now at age 48 earns his living as a diver and for-hire captain for researchers. "The commercial guys would fish it down to the last fish, and the recreational guys would hold a tournament to see who could catch it," DeMaria says.
The Gladdings and other commercial operators appear resigned to the regulatory realities, even if the size and number of fish on their hooks make them question scientists' models showing shrinking fish populations -- and even though they feel they're getting shafted to leave more fish for recreational anglers.
This past year, Peter Gladding sat on the panel that drew the Tortugas closed-area boundaries and watched firsthand as one of his most productive fishing areas was declared off-limits. But the fish "need a break," the 51-year-old says. "When they're spawning, you don't need 60 boats running through them. I want the fish to be here in the future."
Red Snapper: A Lesson in the Gulf
Red snapper have reappeared off Tampa Bay. Overfishing drove snapper, a commercial species since at least the Civil War, to the closest thing to a population collapse the Gulf has seen. The species pulled well back from its historic range, which once stretched into the Keys. Federal officials were moving to bring red snapper under the Gulf's first individual quotas when Congress imposed a quota moratorium in 1996. Fish managers resorted to more traditional tools, and the species has made a comeback -- at least to the middle part of the state. The new season opened on them in April and runs to October. Red snapper show how tricky the questions of habitat preservation and restoration can be: They like oil platforms, says Roy Crabtree, a fisheries management specialist with the National Marine Fisheries Service.
A Fishmonger's Lament
Congress is about to pass a law that will restrict longline fishing in the south Atlantic. Will it really help the billfish?
Amid chest-high ice mounds in a frigid Dania Beach storeroom, fishing fleet owner Vince Pyle surveys 41 gutted swordfish and contemplates the incongruities as the federal government moves to take him out of business. A slender, bespectacled, 46-year-old, Pyle owns six longliners -- boats that at sunset put out 20-mile lines with 400 baited hooks. The bait is for mature swordfish, fish that when dressed weigh more than the 33-pound legal minimum. A boat hooks an average of 20 of the nocturnal-feeders a night. But the hooks also bring in young swordfish, marlin and other game fish as "bycatch" -- the term for regulated species unintentionally caught. U.S. law requires that bycatch, living or dead, go back into the sea. The bycatch issue makes longliners such as Pyle, who sees himself a harvester of fresh seafood, a villain to environmentalists and recreational fishermen, who claim longliners drive down the billfish supply.
The villain image has won out over the harvester in the public policy battle. A bill pending in Congress will close to longliners a California-sized stretch of the Atlantic from the Carolinas to Florida that's an important maturing ground for billfish. The bill authorizes buyouts of up to $450,000 per affected vessels -- primarily the 57 boats that make up the Florida longliner fleet. The fleet operates largely out of Pompano Beach, Fort Pierce and Pyle's Dania Beach with owner-captains pulling in $100,000 annual incomes.
Pyle, who describes himself as your "basic workingman fishmonger," started as a busboy in Boca at a New England Oyster House, a once-prominent Florida chain. He became the chain's executive vice president until its sale in 1985. At 30, divorced, he went to sea.
For the feel of the dangerous longliner life, Pyle recommends The Perfect Storm, a nonfiction account of a swordfish crew lost in a storm. Pyle, after five years and three hospitalizations for hooks through the hand and a grappling hook that smashed his face, took the advice of his new wife, Mary Ellen, to stay on shore. Along with his boats, he owns A Fishermen's Best, a handler that buys catch from 15 other south Florida boats. With his, they account for 1 million of the 5.2-million-pound annual U.S. swordfish quota. Packed on ice, Pyle's swordfish make it to New York's Fulton Fish Market by truck in 25 hours.
At present, $4.8 million of Fisherman's Best's $5 million in annual revenues comes from longline catches. He will have to convert his handling business to importing or watch it go under. Even so, Pyle supports the congressional bill because it protects a "hotspot" for billfish and young swordfish and because he doesn't see much other choice: The National Marine Fisheries Service proposes closing an even larger area -- with no guarantee of a buyout. Pyle stands to get $1.5 million under the buyout after paying off his six boats.
Pyle's friendliness nearly masks the tension of someone tired of not being believed and weary of an argument his industry has lost. Pyle makes the argument anyway: U.S. longliners account for less than 5% of Atlantic billfish deaths a year. Highly migratory, most Atlantic billfish are taken by Spain and other countries.
Taking him out of business, he says, will only save swordfish for someone else to catch. (Indeed, Ellen Peel of Fort Lauderdale's The Billfish Foundation, a recreational-oriented conservation body, expects Florida to be the chief economic beneficiary of the closure. More fish for anglers means more spending on boats, tackle, fuel and hotels.) Meanwhile commercial fishermen of other nations who ignore international conservation measures are free to take the fish once they migrate outside the 200-mile, U.S. territory.
Pyle is a member of a U.S. advisory panel that works with the main multinational management body, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas. He makes a compelling case that scientists don't know enough about the effects of La Niña, El Niño and hurricanes to say whether fish populations have fallen because of natural cycles or overfishing. He shows recent newspaper fishing columns about recreational fishermen reporting resurgent sailfish and swordfish catches and tournaments landing record numbers and size of marlins.
"I see the small, family farmer get so much attention, so much love, rock concerts, anything," Pyle says. "And then I see the small harvester working just as hard in dangerous conditions, and he gets no sympathy. He gets belittled."