AtlanticTarpon_Collapse_Swacina_Paul_CorpusChristiTX_16December2022_Reel4139.mp3

Paul Swacina [00:00:00] Joan Holt, at UT Marine Science Institute, did an analysis of the scales that had been removed by the sport fishermen at the Tarpon Inn in Port Aransas. And, in the lobby of the hotel, there's all these scales that were nailed on the wall, and they had the weight and year that the fish was caught. And Joan arranged for a graduate student to catalog all of the scales, and the information on them.

Paul Swacina [00:00:32] And, we suspected, because of the anecdotal evidence, that the collapse occurred in the mid-sixties.

Paul Swacina [00:00:42] And, it's very difficult because there were so many changes going on in the mid-sixties, from the lack of freshwater inflow, with the new dam on the Nueces River, to the increase in the shrimp fishery and its bycatch, to the oil and gas activity in Nueces Bay and the saltwater discharge, or brine discharge, as it was called, and the hurricane that occurred in 1963, Hurricane Beulah, that wiped out a bunch of the, of the old structures on the island itself.

Paul Swacina [00:01:16] And so, I don't think we ever got to a point where we figured out exactly which factors played what role.

Paul Swacina [00:01:23] But, what Joan was able to determine, from an analysis of the scale samples and the data that they contained, was that it didn't occur in one year. It occurred over a period of time.

Paul Swacina [00:01:34] And, what appears from the scale samples, is that in the twenties, thirties, forties, and even into the fifties, there was a whole variety of sized fish, you know, fish that weighed fifty pounds, and fish that weighed 150 pounds, fish that weigh twenty pounds, and, you know, triple digits.

Paul Swacina [00:01:58] But, as the fishery moved into the 1960s, those smaller fish disappeared and all that was being caught were the large female fish.

Paul Swacina [00:02:08] And that's a classic sign of a collapse of a nursery area, and that there's not enough recruitment going into the brood stock to maintain the population.

Paul Swacina [00:02:21] And, that's the classic example of where things collapse, when those spawning females die off. The whole fishery collapses, because there's nobody there to replace it.

Paul Swacina [00:02:33] So once she determined that, we decided to ... Ivonne Blandon, who was doing the genetic work for Texas Parks and Wildlife, had connections, as did Wes Tunnell at A&M - Corpus Christi, through the Coastal Studies Program, down in Veracruz, Mexico.

Paul Swacina [00:02:53] And, we knew that Veracruz, Mexico, at least anecdotally, had this history in the Panuco River and the other rivers that flowed into the Gulf down in Veracruz, that there had been a net fishery that was capturing all size tarpon and killing them, and using them for fertilizer.

Paul Swacina [00:03:14] And, that had been the story that I was given in the eighties about what had caused the collapse in the sixties, was they got netted out in Mexico.

Paul Swacina [00:03:25] So, we decided to not only investigate that, but to also encourage that, if it still was going on, to end.

Paul Swacina [00:03:33] And so we set up a tarpon symposium in Veracruz, and went down there and confirmed that there had been activity like that in the sixties and also confirmed that tarpon were now given a sport fish status. They were not being netted. They were occasionally being killed in tournaments. And we encouraged that to end.

Paul Swacina [00:04:00] One of the most interesting things that I thought that, from a conservation standpoint, that I learned from the symposium, was there was a couple of guys from Ascension Bay on the Yucatan Peninsula, and they had been commercial fishermen. And there is a program where the Nature Conservancy went down and trained these guys to be fly fishing guides, and they converted from a commercial fisherman to a fly fishing guide in the Yucatan Peninsula in the Sian Ka'an biosphere.

Paul Swacina [00:04:32] And they, on their own dime, had bought bus tickets and rode to Veracruz because they wanted to speak at the symposium and talk to the guys in Veracruz and tell them, "Look, you make a whole lot more money taking rich gringos out fly fishing, than you ever will as a commercial fisherman.".

Paul Swacina [00:04:53] And they explained to me that it was life-changing for them. You know, their kids ended up in college, whereas they barely could feed their family.