A Rockfish By Any Other Name
August-September 2003
This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.
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by Bryan Nichols
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A Tiger Rockfish can live up to 116 years.Gary McIntyre photo. |
Hey, what were you doing in August of 1803? What’s that— nothing? Maybe you should ask the next rockfish you see. Ah, don’t bother. I’ve tried and they’re not talking. Yet. Besides, not so long ago there were a lot of rockfish in the Northwest that were a century old, and a few that lived a mind boggling two centuries or more, but those days are gone. In a relatively short while, our hooks and nets have reduced them to remnant populations of young, small individuals.
Those youngsters are still out there though, waiting for us to ease up so some of them can get old. In the Orca Pass area there are over thirty species of rockfishes, about ten of which you’ll bump into regularly while diving. What are they, anyway? We incorrectly call some of them snapper or cod, but most of us don’t realize they are really scorpion fish, in the same family as those exotic and poisonous lionfish of the tropics.
Don’t believe me? It’s red snapper, not some lionfish wannabe you catch? Try this then—bring your hand down firmly on the dorsal spines of the next ‘red snapper’ you’re going to keep. What you’ll feel from a canary, vermillion or yelloweye rockfish (they’re all red), is venom, a mild version of the toxin in their tropical cousins.
The Northeast Pacific has about 72 species of rockfish in just one genus—that’s pretty remarkable. They seem to be in the process of speciating rapidly, which means that some of the ones we think are the same are becoming, or might already be, different species. One of the reasons for this remarkable diversity is that they have internal fertilization and bear live young. They don’t just spray eggs or sperm out willy nilly—they pick a partner, do a little dance and make a little love. Courtship behaviour like that allows similar populations to become different simply because one doesn’t do the same dance as the other.
All those species also mean that rockfishes dominate many Northwest ecosystems, especially since they are relatively large and predatory. It’s an adaptable genus—rockfish of one sort or another can be found over mud, among boulders, along rock walls, in mid water and in kelp beds. There are enough species and variety for a phenomenal depth range too—you can see blacks, coppers and various juveniles from your kayak, while some types live nearly three kilometers down.
Back in the 70s, scientists discovered an accurate way to age rockfish by slicing through bones in their ears and counting the rings. It became alarmingly apparent that most rockfish live considerably longer than was originally thought, and that this slow growth meant that we were harvesting them unsustainably. Unfortunately, mining fish populations until they’re tapped out is nothing new.
As for recreational fishing, why would you want to casually kill something that’s older than you are anyway? Maybe older than your father, or even your dear old grandmother. Fortunately, such old time rockfish tend to live in deep, cold water (though that doesn’t protect them from commercial fishing). Some of those record holding 205 year old rougheye rockfish (S. aleutianus) can be found from Asia through Alaska right down to California, but they prefer depths greater than 150 meters.
The problem is, it’s not like all those big old rockfish were just sitting around, complaining about kids today and the government. Viagra be damned—rockfishes seem to get better at making little rockfishies as they get older. At over a century, females produce more and possibly higher quality eggs than the young whippersnappers, and are therefore very important to maintaining populations.
Most of the rockfishes we hook today are much younger than that, but not compared to other fish. How old is that whopper Chinook salmon you caught? Maybe six. How old is that modest quillback rockfish you caught? Five or six times that, and it could live to nearly a century. A six year old quillback probably has to avoid hooks and nets for another five years before it even hits puberty.
Some aren’t sexually mature until they’re over twenty years old! That’s an awful long time to wait to start dating, particularly when another species seems intent on eating you long before then. It’s also an excellent reason to set aside a few “no fish” zones in an area like Orca Pass, to let at least some of our amazing rockfish get older, wiser and more productive.
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Rockfishes of the Northeast Pacific
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The Rockfishes of the Northeast Pacific |
It seems appropriate to finish this article with a big, heavy, 400 page treatise on The Rockfishes of the Northeast Pacific. Sound a bit too scientific for your liking? Then you’ve never met author Milton Love. The first sentence in this remarkable tome is “We wrote this book because rockfishes are cool.”
He and coauthors Mary Yoklavich and Lyman Thorsteinson are right, of course. Rockfishes are cool. Magnificent even, which is what their genus name Sebastes means. Nonetheless, it is disturbingly easy to write dry, boring and decidedly uncool books and papers about cool topics—scientists are adept at it. Fortunately, this is not one of those books. It’s filled with illustrations, photographs and art. Beautiful underwater images, gyotaku fish prints, historical photos and Ray Troll’s delightful colour artwork feature prominently throughout.
Nearer to my heart is the writing—it’s amusing, alarming, awe inspiring, entertaining and interesting. Nearer to my wallet is the price—you can get a paperback version of this book, complete and colorful, for only $25 US. Texts such as this often run three or four times that. This one was deliberately kept affordable and is well worth buying. Milton S. Love is Associate Research Biologist at the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has written other popular science books. Mary Yoklavich leads the Habitat Ecology Team of NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service Santa Cruz Laboratory. Lyman Thorsteinson is Deputy Director of the US Geological Survey’s Western Fisheries Research Center in Seattle.
Rockfish Get a Break
Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), in consultation with sport and commercial fishermen, has proposed over 100 sites as potential Rockfish Conservation Areas (RCAs), where fishing would be closed in order to protect these largely sedentary fish. In taking this action, DFO is following the prescription for marine reserves advocated by conservationists and scientists worldwide.
Of the 28 RCAs that DFO established in 2002, four are in Orca Pass, and all of these correspond to the ‘biodiversity richness’ zones that People for Puget Sound, Georgia Strait Alliance and other Orca Pass project partners have identified for possible special management. These areas are D’Arcy Island, Portland Island, Saturna/ Belle Chain Islets and North Mayne, just outside Active Pass.
This year, the rest of the proposed 100+ RCAs will be reviewed. Another eight of these fall within Orca Pass, and several coincide with biological richness zones identified there: Zero and Little Zero Rocks, Gooch/Domville Islands and Bedwell Harbour/ South Pender.
The life history of rockfish make them particularly vulnerable to over-harvest, and so Rockfish Conservation Areas are critical to give these fish a chance to grow old and successfully reproduce. Rockfish grow slowly and are extremely long-lived, reaching 90 centimetres and in some species, over 100 years. They’re slow to reach sexual maturity (for most, around 20). Survival of young rockfish is subject to ocean conditions, and years of good survival seem to occur every 15 to 20 years. Over the past few decades rockfish have been harvested to such a degree that they are now being considered for listing under Canada’s Species at Risk Act.
© From the July 2003 issue of Georgia Strait Alliance’s Strait Talk available in PDF at www.georgiastrait.org.
© Bryan Nichols is studying marine science in Florida and hopes to find out when and why rockfishes make sounds underwater. Maybe he will be able to ask some of them about the old days.
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