There are very few things that are as much fun as looking at
Florida Keys Real Estate and buying a home in the Keys from me but fishing
comes close. Why not do both? Let's look at Florida Keys homes for sale then go
fishing. If the Anglers get their way you will be allowed to take home a
Goliath Grouper, formally known as a Jewfish. It has been illegal to kill
and/or keep one since 1990.
This is a fish story. A really BIG fish story.
Florida’s waters are as full of odd creatures as our streets
are. We’ve got walking catfish, which are both invasive and disturbing to
watch; the pig-snouted (but delicious) hogfish; and some weird-looking sea
cucumbersthat are valuable because some folks believe them to be an
aphrodisiac.
But if size matters to you, then let’s talk about the aptly
named goliath grouper. Mature ones can reach eight feet long and weigh so much
you wouldn’t want one to fall on you. It would be like being clobbered with a
falling piano. (And as REO Speedwagon taught us, you can tune a piano but you
can't tuna fish).
Back when my kids were little, I often took them to the
Florida Aquarium, where they would play in the outdoor splash zone until their
fingers got all pruny. Then I’d get them dried off and we’d roam around
marveling at the sharks and seahorses. When we got to the tank with the goliath
groupers, though, we would always stop, awestruck. They were so huge we felt as
if we’d been hit with a shrink ray.
Yet these giants are nothing to be scared of.
“They’re curious and somewhat friendly,” Luiz Barbieri, who
leads the marine fisheries research program at the Florida Fish and Wildlife
Research Institute, told me this week.
Goliath groupers tend to stick in one offshore area and not
roam around, making them easy to find. Sightseeing divers who frequently visit
those areas have become fascinated with them, to the point of giving some of
them names like backyard pets — Grace, Braveheart, and Pokémon, to name a few.
Tourists from around the globe travel to Florida and pay good money just to
dive in and snap selfies with them.
I guess you could say those divers are hooked on hanging
with these star fish (pauses for readers to finish rolling their eyes).
“They’re these gentle giants,” a scientist named Sarah
Frias-Torres, because she’s been studying goliath grouper since 2003, told me.
“Encountering one of them on a dive is the most amazing wildlife encounter you
can have in Florida.”
Their friendliness, though, makes them vulnerable to their
only predator: humans.
“In the 1970s and ’80s,” columnist Ed Killer reported
recently in TCPalm.com, “divers easily harvested them using powerheads on
spearguns, essentially underwater .357 magnums. Boaters mounted winches on
gunwales to land the big fish. Fish houses paid as little as 40 cents per pound
and a 300-pound fish could yield platter loads of fried grouper fingers.”
I talked to a veteran commercial fisherman named Don
DeMaria, who years ago used to spearfish for goliath groupers up and down the
Florida coast so he could sell them. Then he started noticing they were harder
to find. And he saw flagrant abuse by anglers — half-dead fish swimming around
with the shafts of spears sticking out of them, for instance.
“It just got out of control,” he recalled.
To save them from going extinct, in 1990 the agency then
known as the Florida Marine Fisheries Commission banned killing and possession
of goliath groupers, a ban that remains in place to this day. (Yes, the ban on
catching them even applies to the one called Pokémon.) Two federal fisheries
agencies also imposed bans, so they were protected in both state and federal
waters.
Leaving them alone for three decades has revived the goliath
grouper population, Barbieri said — or so it appears. No one knows exactly how
many there were before 1990, nor how many are swimming around now, he said.
It’s just that they seem to be showing up more than they used to, particularly
around artificial reefs.
“This is a success story,” Frias-Torres agreed. “We have
managed them back from the brink of extinction. We need to celebrate our
success.”
And how would Floridians like to celebrate? By catching some
of those big ol’ goliath groupers the way they did back in the ’80s!
Unable to resist the lure of a forbidden fish, these folks
have for years been clamoring for the marine commission’s successor, the state
Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, to let them go back to killing
goliath groupers.
After years of refusing to take the bait, so to speak, this
month the commissioners finally said yes to letting people “harvest” the
groupers again.
“I think the time has come, and I think we should look at
where we’ve come in 30 years with this fishery,” Commission Chairman Rodney
Barreto, a Coral Gables developer, said. “Believe it or not, it’s another great
conservation story. It really is. We should be applauding ourselves.” Remind me
not to invite Commissioner “Salute It By Slaying It” Barreto to my next
birthday party.
The commissioners voted, 6-1, to tell their staff to come
back in October with a formal proposal for what they called “a limited harvest.”
Normally the word “harvest” means reaping a crop you’ve
spent a lot of time tending so it would grow. In the case of the goliath
grouper, “harvest” means “killing that ginormous fish to get a trophy for my
wall.”
“A wonder of creation”
There were calls to end the goliath grouper fishing ban in
2001, 2011, and again in 2018. That’s because some people don’t appreciate
goliath groupers the way those eco-tour divers do.
Instead of “cute” they use words like “lazy” and
“irritating.” (Sounds like my high school principal talking about … uh,
someone.)
“Anglers fishing for snook, snappers, cobia and other
species routinely tell of how they were reeling their catch to the surface when
a Volkswagen-sized goliath grouper grabbed their fish and snapped their line,”
the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported in 2001.
How often does that happen? According to scientists, rarely.
The groupers usually eat crabs and small fish, not what anglers are angling
for. Nevertheless, some folks have repeatedly used those “that-fish-stole-my-fish”
anecdotes to argue for an end to the ban.
The hardest push to lift the ban came three years ago — and
it produced the biggest push-back. When word spread that the wildlife agency
was considering letting anglers catch and keep 100 goliath groupers, some
56,000 people signed petitions against it.
I covered that 2018 wildlife commission meeting. More than
50 people showed up to talk about the big fish, nearly all of them opposed to
any “harvest,” even a limited one.
Many speakers wore T-shirts that said, “Save the Goliath
Grouper,” because they were sure lifting the ban would doom the species. Among
them was a contingent from Eckerd College’s diving club, including their
adviser, Rabbi Ed Rosenthal, who jokingly referred to the club as “Scuby Jew.”
He pointed out how appropriate it was that he was there to speak for a species
that was known, prior to a 2001 name change, as the jewfish.
“The sea is God’s,” the rabbi told commissioners. “The
grouper is a wonder of creation.”
More than one speaker in that hearing compared lifting the
ban to the commissioners’ controversial decision in 2015 to hold the state’s
first bear hunt in 21 years. The hunters slaughtered the bears so fast — even
killing mother bears still nursing their young — that the state had to end the
week-long hunt after just two days. The commission has never held a second one.
In that 2018 meeting, the commissioners scuttled all talk of
lifting the ban. They did so in part because the state’s scientists couldn’t
answer the most basic questions about the species, such as how long they live
or how many there are.
There’s a theory that, like other groupers, some goliath
groupers switch genders from female to male, making them what scientists call
“protogynous hermaphrodites” (which is also the name of my favorite indie rock
band).
But nobody can say for sure. Without knowing how many female
goliath groupers there are, biologists find it difficult to determine their
potential to produce more fish.
When I was talking to Barbieri, the state biologist, I asked
him if anything had changed since 2018. Had he and his colleagues solved any of
those mysteries about “the wonder of creation” that had kept the commissioners
from approving a “harvest” back then?
No, he said. The goliath grouper remains as big a mystery as
it was three years ago.
Seems to me that all that’s changed is that now a majority
of the commissioners — gubernatorial appointees — want to kill a giant fish, no
matter what the science says. This, notes Frias-Torres, despite the fact that
the tourist-friendly gargantuans are more valuable to the economy alive than
dead, because you can visit a live one over and over, but you can kill it only
once.
‘A unique recreational fishing opportunity’
According to independent scientists like Frias-Torres,
goliath groupers are not really doing as well as they might seem.
The juveniles live amid mangroves. Sea level rise and
erosion, plus humans with saws, have been cutting into the state’s coastal
mangroves so we have fewer now than we used to.
Adult groupers sometimes hang out near Florida’s coral reefs
— but the reefs are in the middle of an ecological disaster. A plague called
stony coral tissue-loss disease has swept through the reef the way a hurricane
sweeps through a Florida trailer park. And speaking of disasters, grouper are —
like manatees — acutely vulnerable to toxic algae blooms, which we’re
experiencing again this summer.
Speaking of toxic things, eating them is bad for you now.
Air pollution that’s settled into the water has accumulated in the fish that
the goliath groupers eat, so now the grouper contains a tremendous amount of
mercury.
Goliath groupers more than 5 feet long contain a level of
mercury considered dangerous to humans, Barbieri said, so “if the commission
decides to move forward with a harvest we would work with the state Department
of Health to develop seafood consumption advisories. … It’s something the
public will have to be careful about.”
Anyway, he said, they don’t want to wipe out the older,
larger fish. Most likely they will propose limiting the catch to fish between
47 and 67 inches long.
Got that? You probably shouldn’t eat them, and you won’t be
able to catch the really big ones for a trophy, and we don’t really know enough
about them to say what damage there might be on the population if you catch a
bunch.
So why lift the ban, exactly? I keep casting around for the
reasoning here, but it looks like a mistake on an epic scale (sorry, I’m hooked
on puns).
The commission’s staff told their bosses that this is a
chance to “provide a unique recreational fishing opportunity in Florida state
waters.” Know why it’s unique? Because the goliath grouper, which used to range
across the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, has been wiped out throughout most
of that range. Florida is close to their last stand.
And now their supposed protectors want to let some of them
be killed. Here’s my proposal: If the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation
Commission goes ahead with this, we should petition for a change in the
agency’s name to take the word “conservation” out of it, so no one will get
confused about their purpose. Maybe we could replace it with “Harvesting".
Now we know that although catching a Goliath Grouper would
be fun, it is still not as exciting as closing on a Florida Keys home. Come on
down to the Keys, let's look at homes for sale and once we close you can go
fishing any day you want. You still can't kill a Goliath Grouper but maybe one
day soon.
Gary
Gary McAdams, PA
Realtor/Notary Public
Barbara Anderson Realty
Key West, Florida