Listening to my great uncle tell tales of the Bahamas 50 years ago captured my imagination and prompted me to run to Arawak Cay for a bowl of conch salad. My uncle speaks of sailing in Montague Bay and seeing the seagrass beds under his boat covered with conch. Now he tells me that it is rare to find a conch there.
I have heard this same story throughout the country. The previous generation of fishermen will tell you that they would go out sculling in a wooden boat without an engine and pick up conch with a hook on a long pole. Or just walk along the shore and find plenty.
Reverend Arthur Brown speaks about his experiences conch fishing around Eleuthera: “They’d go in the bay and meet conch as big as they want ﾗ crawling on the bay ﾗ didn’t have to touch the water. Right now they have to go miles to get a dozen conch”.
Fishermen are worried, and rightly so. Their livelihood is at stake. Our fishery and a critical part of our culture are threatened. “They used to say conch would never run out-but that is just how much there used to be.
Now they runnin’ out fast,” said another fisherman from South Eleuthera.
We have been eating conch for generations, and I can still go down to Potter’s Cay and buy a conch salad. On the surface, nothing has changed, but the problem is below the waves. Fishermen have to go further and deeper to catch conch. Much of the conch that we eat comes from the southern Bahamas
since now conch is scarce in the central and northern Bahamas. These new fishing grounds will tide us over for a while, but there is not an endless supply.
Conch is commercially extinct throughout most of the Caribbean. Habitat destruction may play a role in their decreasing numbers, but overfishing is the main cause of this drastic decline. In the past few decades, intense fishing pressure had led to the collapse of the conch fishery in many Caribbean countries. This has resulted in the temporary or permanent closure of the conch fishery in Cuba, Florida, Bermuda, the Netherlands Antilles, Colombia, Mexico, the Virgin Islands and Venezuela.
There are two clear warning signs that we are depleting our Bahamian conch fishery. Firstly, we have to go further to find conch now that the near-shore fishery has been depleted. There are numerous reports of people using hookahs to catch conch in areas that were once natural refuges since the animals were too deep to be caught. Secondly, although it is illegal to catch immature conch (the “rollers” that do not yet have a flared lip), an increasing proportion of the conch now landed are juveniles.
These “rollers” have not yet had a chance to reproduce. In some parts of the northern Bahamas up to 90 per cent of the conch landed are juveniles. Students in South Eleuthera studied old and new piles of conch shells. They found that in the piles at least 10 years old 5 per cent of the conch were juveniles, while of the conch caught today, 95 per cent are juveniles. Catching conch before they have reproduced threatens the sustainability of our resource for the future, and it threatens the livelihoods of the fishermen who depend on it.
Most fishermen know that it is illegal to catch the “roller” conch but they continue to do so because there is insufficient law enforcement. Fishermen are calling for more enforcement of these laws that protect their common resource. Let’s listen to them.
We need to heed the warning signs and take action to ensure that our conch does not become commercially extinct, as it already has throughout much of the Caribbean. Let us learn from the mistakes of our neighbours and decide not to make the same ones here.
Conch were fished heavily in Florida, until there were very few left. In 1986 a complete ban on harvesting conch was implemented. This ban is still in place, and since then there has been only very limited recovery of the stock.
What the Floridians learned was that once the density of conch in a certain area becomes very low, they do not reproduce. We are approaching this threshold here in the Bahamas, and this is something that we should all be concerned about. Conch populations do not easily recover from low levels.
Management is only successful if it is put in place while populations are still healthy. We should not wait until we have no conch; we must act now.
What is to be done? In the Exuma Land and Sea Park where no fishing is allowed, conch density is much higher than outside the park. There is more conch reproduction in the park than outside it.
Conch larvae float with the ocean currents for about a month before settling in seagrass beds. There is considerable flow of conch larvae, juveniles and adults from inside the park where the conchs were hatched, into areas outside the park where they can be caught by fishermen.
Our new network of marine reserves will provide a source of conch for areas outside the reserves, and we must put these Reserves in place as quickly as possible.
The conch is listed as a threatened species by CITES (Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species). In many parts of our country, conch populations are already at or below the Caribbean Fisheries Management Council’s definition of overfished.
We need stronger enforcement of our current laws regarding harvesting conch, and we should reassess the amount of conch that we export from The Bahamas.
Our Bahamian conch is not something that we can afford to loose.
Casuarina McKinney is the executive director of the Bahamas Reef Environment Educational Foundation. She has a degree in marine biology and environmental science and policy from Duke University. She is originally from Governor’s Harbour, Eleuthera. For more information: breef@coralwave.com (www.breef.org)
Taken from The Nassau Guardian
