BajaNomad - Mulege Fish Market..supplied by the Pangeros

Mulege Fish Market..supplied by the Pangeros

Hook - 12-13-2007 at 11:18 AM

I'm certainly not a fish-hugger, but has anyone ever seen a study on what size the true red snapper has to reach before it can begin to procreate?

I'm not about to try and change the habits of the local commercials but I try to observe this whenever possible.

Trying to establish my own personal slot limit on these tasty fish.

Osprey - 12-13-2007 at 11:34 AM

Hook, good question! Our local guys make a living by catching the most small fish (one kilo or less) for the very specific market created in Cabo and La Paz by restaurantuers for the menu item "Entero" -- the whole fish on the platter. I once said on this forum that if you catch all the smallest fish of a specie, you will wipe em out. Somebody wrote in that that is not true -- they implied you might be helping the fishery. I don't see how. Maybe that authority is still on the board and can enlighten us further.

Hook - 12-13-2007 at 11:43 AM

Size matters in procreation. Maybe you have heard that before.......... :lol:

All size limits that I heard of (based on scientific reasons) set the limit at something above the size where they have had a chance to reproduce at least once.

So, a blanket statement like taking the little ones helps the species as a whole is not necessarily true. You can be eliminating future breeders.

vandenberg - 12-13-2007 at 11:53 AM

Osprey,
I believe that it is the longliners and net fisheries that do all the damage and are depleting the fish population in this sea.
I can't see that local fishermen, with, mainly, handlines and small nets could possibly make a dent in the fish population, no matter what.
However, with the fish numbers on the decline for years, it's difficult to bring it back to their previous numbers. Once a large part of the breeders are gone it take years to establish a new chain.

Cypress - 12-13-2007 at 12:27 PM

About those Red Snapper. Were just about wiped-out in the Northern Gulf of Mexico about 20 years ago.

The govt. imposed seasons, size restrictions, quotas, etc.

You can now catch your limit most any time. By the way, the limit is two fish.

With fuel at around $3.00 a gallon and most snapper several miles offshore most snapper are caught with the silver hook at the local seafood market.

Don Alley - 12-13-2007 at 05:46 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by vandenberg
Osprey,
I believe that it is the longliners and net fisheries that do all the damage and are depleting the fish population in this sea.
I can't see that local fishermen, with, mainly, handlines and small nets could possibly make a dent in the fish population, no matter what.
However, with the fish numbers on the decline for years, it's difficult to bring it back to their previous numbers. Once a large part of the breeders are gone it take years to establish a new chain.

The problem with the small nets is that there are thousands of them in the SOC, and they are used on the relatively limited shallow waters. They've had an enormous impact on inshore fishing. Mesh size has gotten smaller as well. As far as I can tell, tey are not regulated. Offshore, larger buoyed drift nets have been banned north of the border, and the UN has called for bans on them on the open ocean. They are still used in the SOC.

Locally they are getting the huachinango in deeper water, with hook and hand line. Not as destructive a practice with little bycatch. But large commercial boats from the mainland, that cannot themselves fish inside the Loreto Marine Park, sometimes launch pangas to fish for these snappers in the park. I've seen them drop off their pangas to fish off Punta Lobos on Carmen, a good huatchinango reef there.

Fisheries in the SOC have declined dramatically, and I see no meaningful attempts to regulate commercial fishing here, even in the so-called Marine Park.

Skipjack Joe - 12-13-2007 at 08:17 PM

<<Harvesting juvenile fish hurts a population less>>

The only way I can think of that makes sense is that since very few fish reach maturity by taking immature fish you may very likely be removing fish that would have been removed by predation before they contributed to the population anyway.

Also, supposedly you are removing fish that are not yet adding offspring to the population.

So, they are less 'valuable' to the survival of a population. It makes sense but since you are removing future mature fish you will be reducing stocks to some degree.

I guess the ideal would be to harvest as much as you can of fish that would have been removed by other natural causes. Obviously that's not happening because the stocks are falling.

There are other factors besides fishing that may be causing these declines. The migration of enormous schools of humboldt squid, each growing 30lb/year (or something like that) could be a major contributor also. These squid(s) aren't seasonal either.

P.S. Huachinangos are one of the most beautiful fish that swim in my opinion.

baitcast - 12-14-2007 at 06:25 AM

Has the squid population always been like it is today or is this something that has taken place in the last ten or twenty years??

I,ve often wondered what would happen after the shark population was virtuality wiped out,a chain reaction if you will,those big squid must take a huge toll on the juvenile fisheries to go along with nets and everything else.