For more than two decades, Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute has been introducing thousands of sea bass back into the ocean in an attempt to replenish the species in the waters from Santa Barbara to San Diego.
“We’ve been doing the stock enhancement program for 20 years now, where we culture fish and release them into the wild,” said Mike Shane, marine biologist. “To give you an idea of the impact, in the 1950s at various recreational landings people were catching up to 60,000 fish. Then, by the early ’70s, that number was down to several thousand fish a year.”
This adversely affected the sport and commercial fishing industry, causing it to crash. In an effort to fix the problem, lawmakers and Hubbs-SeaWorld biologists got together and put a program into action to help remedy the situation.
“Because of significant decreases in both commercial and recreational fishing, the Stock Enhancement Program was initiated in the ’80s as a way to help the declining fishing industry,” Shane said. “The sea bass was selected as the species to use for this project.”
The biologists “tag” fish prior to releasing them into the ocean as a way to determine how far they travel, how long they live and other data that will help evaluate the effectiveness of the program.
“We’ve taken a responsible approach to our enhancement activities by tagging every individual fish that we release,” Shane said. “We put into the cheek of every fish released a coded wire tag that looks like a number-two piece of pencil lead. Each fish has its own unique tag, so when we recover a fish we know where it came from and that data allows us to assess the effectiveness of our program.”
The sea bass program started in 1986 and to date Hubbs-SeaWorld Institute has released more than 1.2 million fish; of those, they’ve recovered 1,600 tags. Recovering those tags is paramount to documentation of fish activity. To encourage fishermen to save tags, the group started the “Save Your White Sea Bass Head” collection program.
“We have a program in place at most of the sport-fishing landings up and down the coast,” Shane said. “We have freezers in those locations for fisherman to deposit the heads of the sea bass they’ve caught along with a form stating where they caught the fish. That way, after checking the fish’s tag we’ll know where it’s traveled and how long it’s been in the wild.”
Earlier this year, after examining the head of one of the fish caught in San Diego, it was determined to be more than 12 years old, making it the oldest captured fish in the program’s history. It was also determined that the sea bass was originally released in the Santa Barbara Islands.
With each fish head returned, valuable information is retrieved, allowing biologists to learn more about the migration of the sea bass and the effectiveness of their program.
In an effort to collect as many sea bass heads as possible, the Hubbs-SeaWorld Institute has created a contest involving commercial passenger fishing vessels in which fish heads can earn them money and prizes.
“We have a contest where we ask the guys on the boats to save the heads of white sea bass for us and every six months we’ll give out $2,000 in prizes,” Shane said. “We give the boat that saves the most heads for us $1,000 and another $1,000 for the boat that turns over the most tags. I think this prize money gives them extra incentive to save the heads rather than to just cut them off and throw them back into the ocean.”
Each fisherman who drops off a sea bass head at one of the various collection points has his or her name entered into a random drawing for $500 for their efforts.
To learn more about the sea bass program, call Karen Terra, (619) 226-3881.