I explained that I was being more than usually pessimistic on purpose, in the hope that the powers that be would begin to take the preservation of our marine resources seriously before it was too late.
I told him that the grouper will aggregate to breed under the full moon for the first time this year on November 9. I said I had heard that a proposal for some sort of protection existed, but evidently Cabinet were leaving it to the very last minute before acting. I had no idea whether it would do so in time.
It is always darkest before dawn they say. Half an hour after that conversation two people whom I trust assured me that the grouper season was going to be debated in Cabinet on Tuesday, October 21 at noon. So I am feeling guardedly optimistic for a change.
Dr Marshall the Bahamian scientist and world class fisheries management expert who is now working in the Office of the Prime Minister kindly asked me to go along with him and make my case for an immediate three-month season. Unfortunately, I will be away next week, so I wrote him a letter instead, saying more formally what I have written below.
The case for a closed season, like the one we have had for crawfish for decades, is very simple. Since Joseph taught Pharaoh and the Egyptians good husbandry there has been a taboo on land against “eating the seed corn”. In our over-populated modern world we must apply the wisdom of the ages at sea as well.
If you kill the fish when they gather together to breed and are easiest to catch, sooner or later you will lose the lot. It has happened to our neighbours and it will certainly happen here if they are not protected.
No one knows for sure how many grouper we have left today. We must make sure that every mature fish gets to make more grouper! A season from 1 November to 1 February every year would cover their breeding period.
If we close the season for only one or two of the breeding months, we cannot be sure that we will be protecting the best or even most of the mature fish. Maybe the same grouper spawn at each of the three full moons in the season, if they are not caught. Maybe they only spawn in their birth month. Maybe it varies. We just do not know.
So the only way we can be sure that every mature grouper remaining in our waters will get to spawn in peace is to close the season for the whole three months.
To be honest, anything is better than nothing. A partial closure is better than none at all, although personally I think a partial closure just might backfire.
When you shorten a season rather than closing it completely you concentrate the fishing pressure into a shorter period, increasing the pressure on the fish and coincidentally tempting fishermen to take bigger risks.
They could be tempted to put to sea in spite of bad weather that would normally keep them in port. The divers might be tempted to risk their lives even more than at present, by going far too deep.
I am a hundred per cent sure that the right answer is to close the season and compensate the fishermen as much as possible by hiring them and their boats to go out and mount guard on the spawning aggregations to protect them against foreign poachers.
If at the same time, they can collect some data on the numbers of breeding fish without disturbing them, so much the better. BREEF and the Bahamas National Trust collected about $20,000 last April at our Save the Grouper party. We will give this money to start such a scheme this November, if the government puts the protection in place.
So, if you agree with this proposal, now is your chance to be a Guardian of the Sea and light up those phones. You have until noon Tuesday.
Editorial, The Nassau Guardian
