Despite several unforeseen events, signs are promising for fish numbers.
April can be the cruelest month for Texas’ million-plus coastal anglers, a stretch of weeks when warming tides tease of the annual shift into coastal fishing’s “high season” after months of chilly lethargy while an invariable siege of bay-churning wind and muddy freshwater runoff keeps frustrated anglers off the water.
It’s a month of uncertainty, too, as anxious anglers search for and interpret signs of what’s to come. Will fish numbers be better than this past year, or worse? Which species are doing best and in which bay systems? How have events of the past few months affected fish and the bays and even anglers themselves?
Those annual questions have a bit more gravity this April, coming as they do in the wake of a months-long series of events, some unprecedented, each with the potential to significantly affect Texas coastal fisheries. From late August through January, the Texas coast saw a major hurricane slam into the middle coast, middle and upper coast bays swamped for weeks by record-setting rains and flooding associated with that storm, record heat in November and back-toback blasts of frigid winter weather that in January dropped water temperatures in Texas bays to levels not seen in at least a decade.
Positive returns
There are “tea leaves” out there to read, and more to come over the next several weeks as anglers and Texas coastal fisheries managers gather empirical and anecdotal evidence answering those questions. But the early signs are, happily, encouraging for Texas’ coastal fisheries and anglers.
“Despite everything we’ve been through — all the extreme weather we’ve seen over about the past six months or so — things look surprisingly good,” Mark Fisher, science director for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s coastal fisheries division, said of the state of the state’s inshore marine fisheries.
Fisher bases that assessment on empirical evidence collected by TPWD coastal fisheries staff over the past months, including a 10week gillnet sampling program that began almost immediately after Hurricane Harvey hit the coast and scores of monthly samplings through bag seine and bay trawl efforts.
Results of the 10-week gillnet sampling program that began in mid-September, just a couple of weeks after Hurricane Harvey’s strike on Texas, and continued into November produced evidence of a surprisingly robust speckled trout and redfish fishery, coast wide, Fisher said.
“Coast-wide, redfish and trout abundance went up this past fall compared to the previous fall,” Fisher said. “That’s even with the freshwater flooding we had in some bays.”
What precipitated that bump?
It could be better habitat conditions and increased forage base in the bay over the past couple of years, courtesy of massive loads of nutrients poured into the systems by heavy rains and runoff. But it also could be because fewer fish were taken by anglers this past autumn than in previous years.
“There was a dramatic drop in fishing pressure after Harvey,” Fisher said. “People on the Texas coast and especially in Houston, which has the highest number of licensed fishermen in the state, had a lot of things other than fishing on their minds this past fall.”
Galveston Bay, hard hit by Harvey’s flooding, saw that drop in recreational fishing pressure but didn’t see a dramatic change in fish abundance during the fall gill net sampling, said Glen Sutton, Galveston Bay ecosystem leader for TPWD’s coastal fisheries.
“What we saw as far as trout and redfish and most other species was pretty much normal for what we’ve seen the past several years. Our finfish are doing just fine and dandy — stable or increasing, in most cases,” Sutton said.
That applies to almost all species of finfish in Texas bays, including black drum.
“Black drum are doing very good, coast-wide, but especially along the lower coast,” Fisher said gill net samplings indicated. And recent anecdotal evidence tied to black drums’ spawning season appears supporting evidence of a strong black drum population in Galveston Bay.
Adult black drum spawn during spring, ahead of most other inshore finfish and a full six months or so from the autumn spawn of their redfish cousins. The big adult drum, most measuring more than 30 inches but many 40 inches or longer and weighing as much as 60 pounds or more, gather and concentrate in the areas near bay/Gulf passes where they accomplish their spawn, the fertilized eggs carried by spring tides into estuaries rimming the bay.
Over the past month, anglers fishing traditional black drum spawning areas — along the Texas City Dike, Bolivar Roads, Galveston Channel, San Luis Pass, Galveston Jetties — have enjoyed excellent catch-and-release fishing for the large drum. (Texas regulations mandate release of black drum measuring more than 30 inches.)
The abundance of black drum lends credence to the TPWD’s conclusion that the severe freezes that hit the Texas coast during January did not result in loss of a significant number of fish.
“There were only small, isolated instances where we lost fish from those freezes,” Fisher said. “Fish that were trapped in shallow area or didn’t relocate to the Gulf or deeper, insulated water. There was no general fish kill or anything like what the bays experienced with freezes in the 1980s.”
Even the fish most vulnerable to cold temperatures — snook and gray snapper, two tropical species that have been expanding their range into Texas waters as wintertime coastal water temperatures have for more than two decades averaged higher than in the past — weren’t wiped out by this winter’s freezes. While the freezes did result in loss of pockets of snook along the middle coast, many apparently survived. Over the past couple of weeks, as bay water temperatures have climbed into the mid-70s, several anglers along the middle coast and even in lobes of West Galveston Bay have reported landing several snook, including fish measuring as much as 28 inches.
This winter’s cold temperatures could actually benefit southern flounder, a Texas coastal fish species that has seen its population struggle over the past three decades.
Adult flounder migrate from Texas bays during autumn, relocating to the Gulf of Mexico, where they spawn in the middle of winter. Water temperature plays a crucial role in the success of flounder spawns and recruitment of young flounder into the fishery. Flounder have their best spawning success when Gulf water temperatures are relatively cold — around 62 degrees. Over the past three decades, as climate has changed, average water temperature in the Gulf during winter has climbed, often well above the optimal range for flounder spawning success. The result has bene poor survival and recruitment of flounder.
This past winter, with its cold December and January, just might have helped flounder pull off a good spawn. Evidence of that is showing up in Texas bays in the form of flounder fry being carried into the bays on spring tides. Texas coastal fisheries staffers, who conduct 20 bag seine collection each month in every bay system along the coast, are beginning to see a few tiny flounder in those samplings, Sutton said.
Considering such sampling in recent years have found few, if any young southern flounder, this is good news.
So, too, are TPWD findings that oysters in Texas bays avoided a devastating blow from Hurricane Harvey and its resulting flooding. Harvey’s storm surge did not carry a smothering load of silt, killing oyster reefs in bays along the middle coast, where they storm came ashore. Such an event associated with Hurricane Ike in 2008 resulted in the loss of more than 60 percent of oyster reefs in Galveston Bay.
Suffering small losses
Galveston Bay did see some oyster mortality from Harvey, however. The massive slug of freshwater runoff that poured in the bay as runoff from the storm record-setting rains covered some oyster reefs long enough that the salinity-dependent mollusks died.
“But the losses were a lot less than we were concerned they’d be, considering how much freshwater we had in the bays,” Sutton said. Most of the losses were in the upper Galveston Bay and East Galveston Bay. Reefs father down the bays and closer to the Ship Channel seems to survive much better, almost certainly because a layer of heavier salty water managed to persist around the bottom-hugging oysters as the lighter freshwater runoff stayed on the surface, he said.
Texas coastal fisheries managers and anglers soon will begin getting a clear idea of just how well the bays fisheries weathered the storms of the past few months. Coastal fisheries crews begin their annual spring gill net sampling season this coming week, and results of that 10-week effort will paint a science-driven picture of the status of Texas bay fisheries. And as April wears on, it will lose some of its angler-frustrating wind and provide more sunny, warm days that will push bay water temperatures to 80 degrees, the nominal gauge used to declare the start of “summer” fishing season.
The questions Texas coastal anglers have will be answered. Propects are good they’ll be happy with those answers.