14 minute read
The Guiding Force
For decades, Bonefish & Tarpon Trust has worked closely with fishing guides to identify conservation threats, design research, and apply research results to management proposals.
BY MICHAEL ADNO
The permit fishery in the Lower Keys appeared to flatline in 2020. The once verdant corners of the Lakes, the Marquesas, and the backcountry were eerily quiet. Rumors of dead fish along the beach in Key West followed a chorus of concern from guides. Some wondered if permit might follow the trend of bonefish in the Upper Keys, which is to say disappear completely. For several years before that point, BTT collaborating scientist Dr. Jake Brownscombe had been working diligently with fishing guides to tag Lower Keys permit to determine where they were going and what could be done to stop the decline. That critical work was part of BTT’s more than decade-long Project Permit which seeks to conserve and restore the Keys’ iconic permit fishery. A long-tangled knot began to open when BTT discovered that more than seventy percent of the tagged permit congregated each spring at a place called the Western Dry Rocks. Ten miles southwest of where US 1 spits into the Florida Straits, a canyon of coral and fingers of reef compose the Western Dry Rocks, which lie in about ninety feet of water. Between April and the back end of summer in July, permit and three species of snapper congregate at the Western Dry Rocks for the hedonistic convention of reproduction we refer to as spawning. At the same time, center consoles from the chain of islands descend on it, making quick work of the concentration of fish. Inexorably, sharks take note, and inevitably claim fish from baited hooks. What a cocktail of research collected by BTT and local guides showed was that permit were being harvested by sharks before making it to the boat just as they prepared to spawn, i.e. the most vulnerable and critical point in their adult lives.
The story of that research is indicative of how BTT and anglers have worked together in the past decade: a community identifies a need or threat; BTT conducts the needed research and consults with the community; that exchange yields a plan to address the need or threat and informs the proposals made by BTT to regulatory bodies to improve fisheries management. “That’s at the core of how we operate,” said Dr. Aaron Adams, BTT’s Director of Science and Conservation.
The late guide, Captain Travis Holeman, who was inducted posthumously into the BTT Circle of Honor in 2024, spent hundreds of hours with BTT collaborators, Dr. Brownscombe and Dr. Luke Griffin, tagging permit with acoustic transmitters when the organization first started to look more closely at the permit fishery in the Lower Keys. BTT also consulted with veteran Keys guide Captain Will Benson to locate the best zones to place receivers to pick up the signals of the tagged fish.
“The input provided by Will and other knowledgeable Keys permit guides was essential to the development of our design infrastructure,” said Dr. Ross Boucek, BTT’s Florida Keys Initiative Director.
Soon, BTT scientists were following groups of fish through the backcountry, west into the Lakes, and finally offshore to the Western Dry Rocks by April. Once they learned that this bubble of coral was so central to the fishery, they started to talk with the local community about what sort of regulations could protect it. Would a full closure work? The Lower Keys Guides Association (LKGA) said no, because doing so would immediately eliminate one of the most productive areas for other species all year, impacting the offshore and commercial industries significantly.
So then what about limiting the use of certain baits? Well, as far as permit were concerned, that didn’t address the issue either, because they’d eat jigs as well as they’d eat live crabs. So finally, what BTT and the cadre of guides spanning offshore and inshore, commercial and recreational anglers proposed was a seasonal closure, a four-month period from April 1 till July 31 when permit and snapper arrived to spawn.
If that seems straightforward, it wasn’t. Collecting the necessary body of data, and the subsequent back-and-forth with the community, preceded a long stretch of road before the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) adopted the seasonal closure. First, BTT and members of the LKGA spoke on behalf of the issue before the National Marine Sanctuary Advisory Council in a contentious meeting attended by those who opposed BTT and LKGA’s position. One guide on Sugarloaf woke up to a dead permit hanging from his children’s swing set. Another found a dead permit on his doorstep. Soon after, a small group from the Keys, including BTT staff, LKGA representatives, and lighttackle captains flew to Tallahassee to make their case before the
FWC, with the support of five other organizations. More meetings followed. Pages of comments grew into a pile. And in April 2021, the FWC announced that it planned to close the Western Dry Rocks to fishing from April 1 till July 31 for a period of seven years, at which point the effectiveness of the closure would be assessed. This is the focus of BTT’s current research at Western Dry Rocks in collaboration with the guide community.
In the past decade, the role that guides have played in forming management protocol grew exponentially, and it shows in this case among others during the past few years. “I don’t know why we were late to the game,” said Captain Doug Kilpatrick, former president of the LKGA and BTT Board Member, said of the closure.
“But think people truly care about the fishery. We saw such big change where we said we got to get involved. think we all recognized it was necessary.”
The same sequence between guides and BTT led to the proposed zoning for the National Marine Sanctuary’s “Restoration Blueprint,” which is essentially the federal agency’s overhaul of its management policies that span Biscayne Bay to the Dry Tortugas. In this case, though, BTT, LKGA, and the Florida Keys Fishing Guides Association (FKFGA), developed meaningful solutions that would help eliminate the damage caused by leisure boaters running aground, leaving long-lasting prop scars, or running over migrating tarpon. Those three organizations in the past two years drew on decades of policy implemented first in Everglades National Park and a scientific paper published on effects of recreational boaters, and then sat down to figure out just what was possible. With a handful of liaisons spanning the entire Keys, Boucek laid out charts and said, “Let’s map it out.” Again, ideas like turning the entire Marquesas or southern edge of the Lakes into idle zones were dead ends, so how could they formalize running lanes and protect the historic edges that fish swim, as well as sensitive flats.
“Basically, codifying the historical, traditional practice of fishing guides,” is how Benson put it, “Which is running in deeper water through known lanes.” The submitted comments reflect conventions like coming off plane well ahead of a flat, approaching certain basins with care, and moving through them at a slow speed or only with the push pole.
“The zones that the fishing guides proposed were more expansive than the Sanctuary’s initial proposal for those types of protections,” Adams explained. “It’s pretty telling and interesting that the fishing community is actually now pushing the resource management agencies to do more.” And as Boucek added, “It was a very rare case where fishers are asking for more access limitations than the federal management agency.” The Everglades National Park, with BTT’s and guides’ input, adopted this approach more than a decade back with poll and troll zones, and while it faced resistance from guides when initially proposed, it’s reanimated some sleepy portions of the Park and won over its critics. The contrast between the two processes more than a decade apart showed how much more engaged guides and the broader community had become. “It’s a new generation of guides concerned for their future,” noted Kilpatrick.
“From my standpoint, it’s been tremendously productive,” Benson said. “We’re the eyes and ears,” he added, and the relationship between BTT and the community “just makes us that much stronger.”
Across the Gulf Stream in The Bahamas, local guides have collaborated with BTT to identify eleven pre-spawning aggregation sites (PSAs) for bonefish. Spread among seven islands, these are the places the fish return to annually before making the next age class of the species, thereby sustaining The Bahamas’ flats fishery, which generates more than $169 million for the nation’s economy.
Steven “Kiki” Adderley, a guide at Mangrove Cay Club in Andros, recounted how guides historically avoided PSAs, running around them, and never fished them to protect the species central to not just their career but the lifeblood of the local economy. “Everyone has a passion for these fish, because it’s our livelihood,” Adderley said. “So we try our best to protect them with or without the government.”
The partnership between guides and BTT ultimately led four of the PSA sites to become part of national parks in The Bahamas (some of which were created through a longstanding partnership between BTT and the Bahamas National Trust). The other seven sites that have been officially identified have been proposed for protection to mitigate any threats. Justin Lewis, BTT’s Bahamas Initiative Manager, explained how the tight-knit relationship there helps the guides take more ownership of the fishery, and in turn, they feel more empowered to advocate for it. As Adderley said, “We educate each other, you know? We try our best to work together, better know these fish, and protect them.”
In 2019, Category 5 Hurricane Dorian lashed The Bahamas, stalling for days over the Abacos and Grand Bahama. In its wake, Grand Bahama lost 70 percent of its mangroves. Since then, guides have played a vital role in helping BTT and its partners to restore 100,000 mangroves throughout the region, helping to repopulate a tree that is synonymous with The Bahamas. And as Lewis explained, guides have been central to the project, not just as the people who BTT hired to help but as leaders in their own communities. “Again, it all comes back to advocacy,” Lewis said. “If you don’t have habitat, you don’t have a healthy fishery.” But much broader than just the health of the flats fishery, the restoration of the northern Bahamas’ mangroves also benefits local communities and mitigates the effects of climate change, as the trees blunt the force of storms and wave action, and store vast amounts of carbon.
Trying to place just what the threats are to fisheries or habitats in each community is something that’s become increasingly powerful for scientific outfits like BTT. The organization had sought to reveal what’s important to communities, collaborating with them to stake out the perimeter of their needs and conservation priorities. And based on those, BTT designs its research and shares the findings before forming a recommended regulatory framework or conservation strategy. That’s what has always been at the heart of BTT’s work, because collaborative science creates a knowledge base to guide management actions. In the case of guides and anglers, they’ve realized that the more educated they are, the more effectively they can engage with non-profits, scientists, and management agencies. In the modern world, natural resource management has to be a collaborative process between management agencies, local communities, and groups like BTT, so that the resulting conservation and management measures have a chance of success.
Farther north in Florida, BTT’s staff are also looking at how to weave in the observations of fishing guides, recreational anglers, and commercial fishers into resource management recommendations for the Indian River Lagoon. For decades, rumors inevitably became widely held beliefs about just what led to the fishery’s collapse. Some pointed to the freeze in 2010 that resulted in vast mats of dead gamefish. Others blamed discharges that irrevocably altered the Lagoon’s seagrass flats. Regardless, it was almost impossible to discern what ailment caused the most damage, whether it was nutrient loading, unfettered development, or the algal blooms that haunted the Lagoon for years because of how interwoven these contributing factors are. But undeniable was that the knowledge belonging to longtime users of the resource wasn’t reflected in how it was managed. So BTT took a snapshot of the region from recreational users, both guides and anglers, to first understand how they saw the decline, as well as reports from commercial fleets. Then, BTT took that data and overlaid it with existing scientific sources like aerial photographs, seagrass surveys, and water quality reports. The study found that both recreational and commercial fisheries were in decline in the decade of the 2000s, well before the 2010 freeze event and massive algal blooms. So although the 2010 event was a tipping point for the IRL, the system had been in decline for years prior. This information suggests that conventional wisdom on when and how the IRL ecosystem collapsed needs to be revised, which will help to improve restoration efforts. For 30 years, Captain Edward Glorioso, who grew up on Boca Grande, always looked forward to the weeks when the cold fronts started to wear out and tarpon returned to Charlotte Harbor. For the past decade, he’s guided in his home waters where he derives more than eighty percent of his annual income during the months he focuses on tarpon. He’s watched as tournaments came and went. He took note of how the small community there organized to eliminate break away jigs, and recently spoke out about the return of them. So when he got the opportunity to work with BTT, eager was an understatement. He was happy to participate in tagging programs that swayed regulators to protect the fish outside Florida. He clipped fins for BTT’s recent Tarpon Isotope Study and accompanied scientists during field work to help net and study juvenile fish for BTT’s Juvenile Tarpon Habitat Initiative. “Anything I could do to help and learn more about these fish,” Glorioso said.
On one of those trips, he wondered what the hell they were doing dragging a net through what appeared to be a mosquito ditch. When they came up with 180 juvenile tarpon, it recast his understanding of how vulnerable future generations of this fish might be to the development marching through Sarasota and Charlotte Counties. Those juveniles weren’t just using the mangrove fringes you might expect, but deeper inland at the back of serpentine creeks or narrow spillways.
After years spent working with BTT, Glorioso said, “Everything that they’re trying to do is to improve the fishery. They love the fish.” For BTT, for guides, and the habitats they both want to protect, this process has become more critical with each passing year as threats continue to grow. The organization is exponentially stronger with the guides’ participation and deep well of knowledge. As a result, BTT’s science has also attained a different sort of staying power, one that, with backing of the angling community, has and will continue to inform improvements to fisheries management that will help to safeguard the future of the flats fishery.
Michael Adno lives in South Florida and writes for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Bitter Southerner, where his profile of Ernest Mickler won a James Beard Award.
