Fishing caplin no longer makes sense

Russell Wangersky: Little and sparse and late. Anecdotally, that seems to be this year’s sad little story of the lowly caplin.

Little and sparse and late. Anecdotally, that seems to be this year’s sad little story of the lowly caplin.

The fish I saw this year were a skeletal cousin to the caplin I’ve seen in previous years — skinnier, bonier, shorter. And while they created traffic jams in some places — Middle Cove, for example — I have to wonder if we’re reaching some kind of danger zone for the caplin, a forage species, and the fish and other species above them in the food chain.

Especially because we’re still fishing caplin pretty hard.

A reader sent me a picture showing 13 fishing boats wheeling around the same small aggregation of fish on a calm day in Conception Bay North — it looked more like a traffic jam at Rawlins’ Cross than it did like fishing on the high seas.

And I wonder why we’re doing it.

I can find recent Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) science reports on walrus and Little Tahitan Chinook, on the Channel Darter and the Salish Sucker and the Shortspine Thornyhead, but you have to go back to 2015 to find a stock report on caplin, a report that ends with the somewhat ominous: “Given the poorer environmental and feeding conditions seen in 2014, coupled with the below average strength of the 2014 larval cohort, and the importance of caplin as a forage species, it is suggested that a cautious approach to increasing total allowable catches be adopted.”

That’s not the only frightening sentence. Try this one: “Since 1979, a conservative exploitation rate not to exceed 10 per cent of the projected spawning biomass was advised for caplin stocks in the (northwest) Atlantic.

This advice has not been implemented since 2000 due to the inability to predict stock biomass.” But we fish on.

Now I know that this April, DFO announced an addition $2.4 million for caplin research, including additional acoustic surveys and a fall survey, something the Senate Standing Committee on Fisheries recommended in March. The Senate committee said in their report on cod stocks that caplin research is, “especially important given the fact that caplin stock abundance is still only at about a quarter of the pre-collapse’s level.”

So much depends on such a small fish, from cod to seabirds to whales.

There is a great wonder in having a chance to see the caplin roll in person; to see the turning waves black with fish, scores of dark backs writhing against the sand, is to see a whole bunch of primal things all at once. The fecundity of the ocean, the desperate need to spawn and continue as species that has lived for generations. Here, there’s also, for a few brief days or weeks, a connection with the past, when the residents of this province not only looked forward to the caplin, but actually depended on it.

There’s even a sense of amazement you get when you find a beach fresh with spawn, when the stink of the dead fish is everywhere and miles of sand are that soft, spongy texture that you realize is created by millions upon millions of eggs.

I think we should be having a hard look at whether we should have any caplin fishery at all.

It is, essentially, a destructive fishery: each fish sought for sale is far more than one fish, because the fish that are wanted for the Japanese market are roe-bearing females. In other words, one fish from this particular generation, and scores of eggs that will never have a chance to become fish.

Every single caplin we catch leaves an indelible mark on future generations.

Is the price of caplin — 24 cents a pound for prime caplin, all the way down to seven cents a pound — really worth the cost?

So much depends on such a small fish, from cod to seabirds to whales.