Focusing on Habitats: Now More Essential than Ever AARON J. ADAMS, PH.D.
DIRECTOR OF SCIENCE AND CONSERVATION BONEFISH & TARPON TRUST
ROSS BOUCEK, PH.D.
FLORIDA KEYS INITIATIVE MANAGER BONEFISH & TARPON TRUST
Snook and mangroves. Photo: Pat Ford
H
ealthy Habitat = Healthy Fisheries.
This has long been a BTT mantra, and anglers worth their salt know this. Healthy seagrass beds = tailing bonefish. Good water quality on the edges of banks = long strings of tarpon. A mix of healthy habitats with plenty of places for crabs to hide = great permit fishing. Especially important are the nursery habitats required by juveniles. These are the factories that produce the fish of the future. Backcountry mangrove creeks and wetlands, for example, are critically important nurseries for juvenile tarpon and snook. Unfortunately, we’ve already lost a lot of these habitats, and threats of loss and degradation continue. But we can fight back to restore and protect the habitats important to our fisheries. Although we know that habitat (which includes water quality) is at the core of healthy fisheries, the system that is used for fisheries management doesn’t include habitat. At all. BTT has made it a top priority to change this. We need a new approach to fisheries management with habitat as a central focus. To accomplish this, we are working with our colleagues at Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) and the University of Florida (UF) to find a new approach to fisheries management that includes habitat, and complements the current strategy that is focused
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B O N E F I S H & T A R P O N J O U R N A L FA L L 2 0 2 0
Juvenile tarpon and snook habitat. Photo: Dr. Aaron Adams
on traditional stock assessments. FWC does a good job with stock assessments, but the stock assessment approach was created long ago, when the importance of habitat to fish abundance wasn’t yet recognized. And when habitat loss was not nearly as threatening as it is now. The top threat to species like bonefish, tarpon, permit, and snook, for example, isn’t overharvest, it’s habitat loss and degradation, which a stock assessment can’t address. As is often the case, our colleagues in the terrestrial (land) world of management and conservation are a bit ahead of us. They’ve had a habitat focus for years. They often know, for example, how much habitat is needed to support a healthy population of elk, and focus on habitat as a core component of their management strategy. It’s a bit harder to do this in the ocean because it’s so much harder to visually assess the number of fish, the health of habitats, and how many fish are using those habitats. But we’re pushing forward using an approach that has worked in the terrestrial world. Our species of focus in our collaboration with FWC is snook. This is for two reasons. First, juvenile snook and tarpon use similar habitats as nurseries: backwater mangrove creeks and wetlands. So if we protect juvenile snook habitats, we protect juvenile tarpon habitats. Second, FWC has a lot of data on snook. It may be the fishery in Florida with the most data available. FWC not only collects data from anglers to estimate catch, harvest, and the number of snook that die after release,
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