According to most scientists, the Nassau Grouper’s days are numbered.
Fished to commercial extinction elsewhere in the region, the grouper survives only in The Bahamas in quantities sufficient to fill our plates and stew pots. Besides overfishing by Bahamians, the grouper must evade extensive poaching by Dominicans and Cubans, who keep their hotels and restaurants illegally supplied with our favourite seafood.
In 1997, the Bahamas Reef Environment Educational Foundation began a campaign to save the grouper. Led by a transplanted Briton named Nicholas Nuttall, this little group has educated hundreds of Bahamian schoolteachers, commissioned important fishery studies and lobbied incessantly for the establishment of marine protected areas as the only way to reverse the decline of our fishery resources.
The principle of marine reserves as an effective conservation measure was pioneered by New Zealander Dr. Bill Ballantine, who visited Andros in 1997 at BREEF’s invitation. In 1998, the group sponsored a workshop to discuss the creation of a network of reserves throughout The Bahamas. In 1998 BREEF sponsored the proposal of several marine reserve networks. The proposal was submitted to the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries.
The Minister appointed a panel of experts to evaluate 39 proposed sites. The Department of Fisheries supervised an independent, external panel of experts to evaluate the scientific merit of the proposed marine reserves. He personally instructed the panel to review the benefits of ‘no take reserves’, develop criteria to evaluate proposed reserves and produce a prioritized list of reserve sites. They judged 14 priority sites evenly distributed throughout the country to be the bare minimum for a functional network of marine reserves.
Though the former government later designated five marine protected areas and identified eight others, these good intentions have yet to be legally implemented. And the current government seems to have lost interest in the matter altogether, despite being elected on a strong environmental platform.
In 1997, 1.4 million pounds of grouper were landed in The Bahamas. In 1999, the catch was 1.3 million pounds and, in 2001, it was only 457,000 pounds. Clearly, grouper stocks are collapsing, and one of the big reasons is the overfishing of spawning aggregations, which is going on right now all around the country. To breed, grouper populations congregate at specific times and locations, which makes them highly vulnerable.
In the 1999-2000 grouper spawning season, the government banned fishing at aggregations off Andros and Long Island. This ban was enforced. But since then the fisheries-protection policy has lapsed, despite a declaration last year from new Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries Alfred Grey that spawning aggregations would continue to be protected.
Food and nutrition aside, the demise of the Nassau grouper would be a huge social and cultural loss to the Bahamian people.
Editorial, The Nassau Guardian
