February 03, 2022
This article originally appeared in Rivers & Feathers.
United Women on the Fly is taking the leap from its strong online learning series to offer its first in-person, hands-on event. The Fly Fish Instruct 1.5 Day Women’s Fly Fishing 101 Workshop will be held May 12 & 13 in the mountains of North Carolina.
This workshop is geared towards someone who has never picked up a fly rod, has a minimal amount of experience, or is looking to solidify their basic knowledge of fly fishing. Pisgah Area Women’s Fly Fishing Group is helping to host the program.
Accessible and Affordable Education is one of United Women on the Fly’s Core Values. The organization is working to ensure that all have an opportunity to experience the sport. Founder Heather Hudson, one of three instructors for the workshop, feels there’s a long way to go in the mission to make fly fishing more inclusive. Hodson will lead the workshop with the help of Jessica Whitmire, operations and marketing manager at Headwaters Outfitters Outdoor Adventures, and Hannah Myers, a guide and Outdoor Shop Assistant Manager at Headwaters Outfitters.
Day 1 will be an 8 hr in-person classroom session with a mix of indoor and outdoor instruction. The second day includes a 1/2 day guided trip on private water. The organization’s goal with this workshop is to provide hopeful anglers with the knowledge and equipment to continue their fly fishing journey, and to leave the workshop feeling more comfortable to be independent on the water.
The program is $750 without camping, or $800 with a camping reservation, and includes 1.5 days of classroom instruction, guided fishing, 20% guide gratuity, fishing tackle and gear, course materials, and lunch. Participants will keep the included rod/reel and fishing tackle. Fishing license, gratuities, travel, lodging, breakfast and dinners are not included. All students must be immunized or have a negative Covid test within 72 hrs of arrival, and follow the CDC and State of North Carolina recommendations.
For angling enthusiasts who already have a 5wt 9′ fly rod, reel, fly line or the other equipment offered in this workshop, UWOTF is offering the opportunity to give back to the sport by donating the equipment to the UWOTF scholarship fund and equipment locker. Visit UWOTF’s website for more information on the workshop. Get to know Pisgah Area Women’s Fly Fishing Group here.
February 08, 2019
By Heather Richie
This article originally appeared in Sporting Classics Daily.
The Southeastern Wildlife Exposition began to help fill the calendar of Charleston’s low season while promoting wildlife and nature conservation, but 37 years on, SEWE now welcomes 40,000 visitors and exhibitors from around the world. It would be fair to feel like once you’ve been to one year you’ve been to them all, and that has often been my sentiment living in Charleston, but it just isn’t true to 2019. This year brings new energy worth dusting off the Dubarrys for a see-and-be-seen good time.
The old standbys will be there, with Barbour serving for the first time as a corporate partner. Along with other vendors, they will be selling again at Brittlebank Park this year. It might be time put a feather in that cap, with fashion as one of the new events set to make 2019 unique. Charleston’s new Hotel Bennett will host the inaugural Fashion for Feathers by Audubon South Carolina on Friday, February 15. Attendees will enjoy wine and food prepared by renowned culinary master and “Top Chef” alum Michael Sichel.
SEWE has also partnered with Treasury Wine Estates and Sterling Vineyards to produce a limited edition SEWE bottle that will be available for sale at Charleston Place, Brittlebank Park and Marion Square. Also in Marion Square, Matt and Ted Lee are once again leading the South Carolina Department of Agriculture’s demo line up, so attendees can expect a thorough look at new field-and-fish to table ideas (and admission is free).
On Saturday, Norton + Hodges will sponsor the second annual Birds of a Feather Ladies Brunch Benefit. The event is all-inclusive of food, champagne, live entertainment, and silent auction. Proceeds from this event will directly support Tall Timbers Research Station. Based in Tallahassee, Florida, Tall Timbers’ research, conservation, and education promote exemplary land stewardship.
Don’t miss Ocean Mysteries host Jeff Corwin, wildlife artists Ryan Kirby and Chad Poppleton at the Live Action Auction with YETI®, or the much anticipated (by this angler, at least) expansion into fishing and on-water sportsmanship at the Marine Village.
New this year, the team from Search Tactics and Rescue Recovery (S.T.A.R.R.), who will demonstrate efficient and organized search and rescue skills. These specially trained K-9s will display training and small-scale demonstrations similar to their urban and rural search and recovery missions in the Carolinas and surrounding states. The S.T.A.R.R. Team is made up of an all-volunteer, highly trained group of professionals who help bring home missing persons.
For a full schedule of general admission, special events, and VIP opportunities, plan your weekend at sewe.com. Children 10 and under are free. No matter what they bring us next, DockDogs® is worth every year’s admission. Don’t forget half the fun is in the shopping, and check out the long list of 2019 exhibitors. I might add a feathered number to the Barbour this year, and see you at SEWE.
February 06, 2019
By Heather Richie
This article originally appeared in Sailing Anarchy.
I am the definition of a fair weather sailor. You can keep your Frostbite series and I’ll see you in the spring. I get it that temperatures vary and some Frostbites actually end up in the 60s, but I’m no chancer. So where? I first read about the Cape 31, a one design by Mark Mills first launched during the 2017 Volvo Ocean Cape Town Stopover, sitting in the cold at Christmas. The Southern Hemisphere seemed due far enough south.
Now in Cape Town, excitement is growing as 11 teams prepare to race the Cape 31 Invitational Regatta this weekend, February 8-10. The event kicked off today with the handing over of the charter boats, followed by an afternoon wine tour of sponsor Durbanville Hills wine farm (yes, I manage to write this!). Tomorrow will see practice races and a tech talk, and three days of races will start Friday morning after weigh-ins. Go here to follow results: http://cape31.co.za/cape-31-
The boats are moored in V&A Waterfront with racing set to take place in Table Bay. A total of 11 teams are racing, including three international teams who will be sailing in Cape Town waters for the first time. The international teams, from Sweden, Hong Kong and the UK, arrived today.
“Some are out in Table Bay practicing already,” said Hylton Hale, managing director of Worldsport Sailing. The visitors will race against some of South Africa’s top sailing talent including Olympic sailors, world champions, and Volvo Ocean Race sailors. America’s Cup Shozoloza campaigner Mark Sadler is sailing on Team Orion from Hong Kong; Anthony Spillebean, multiple Volvo Ocean Race campaigner and Fast40 circuit sailor is also on Team Orion; multiple international dinghy champion David Rae is sailing Nitro; Olympic campaigner Roger Hudson on Magic, TP52 campaigners Tina Plattner and Tony Norris on TNT Sailing; 29er World Champ Alex Burger on Turquoise; Volvo Ocean Race sailor Paul Willcox with Mike Bartholomew’s UK team on Flame; and Olympic campaigner Gareth Blanckenberg will be racing on TNT Sailing.
It is absolutely exciting to discover a new one design and see it grow. South Africa and the Western Cape in particular have a rich history of boat building. The Cape 31 is a homegrown concept and build. 12 have been built, with three more on order, adding a substantial boost to local sailing and the economy. A new build will set you back R 2.4 million (about USD 176K).
“The V&A Waterfront is proud to be the host venue for the C31 Invitational Regatta, as supporting and developing South Africa’s ocean economy is a significant focus area for us,” said Donald Kau, Head: PR & Communications at the V&A Waterfront. Kau is keenly aware of Capetonians custodianship of one of the most recognized waterfronts in the world, and hopes the event will encourage them to “reconnect with, and enjoy” their rich marine heritage.
July 27, 2018
Tia Clark calls herself The Casual Crabber. She came to notoriety in 2018 when her Airbnb Experience “Casual Crabbing With Tia” became a 5-star activity for Charleston tourists. Kelsey Dick calls herself The Beardless Fisher, and started giving cast net lessons after friends kept asking her to teach their children. Both women bring expertise to Friday’s Cast Net Demo, and though both their stories and angling goals are dissimilar, an appreciation of their natural surroundings connects them.
Clark began crabbing as self-therapy two years ago when she quit smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol. A cousin offered to take her, and she was hooked after just one trip. Clark says, “Being near the water, discovering crabbing and just playing in the saltwater became everything to me.” A friend started a Facebook page for her, and people began to come along with her. “I said no for a bit, and then gave in,” she says.
A native of Charleston, Clark worked in the city’s food and beverage industry for 19 years. One of her customers sent her a link to Airbnb experiences, and she joined. “Folks started coming to meet me on the docks. I took my first guest out crabbing the first week of July. In November I made one of the top 4 exceptional hosts in Airbnb’s market. My life hasn’t been the same since,” says Clark.
While Clark welcomes her clients to catch and release, she says her family has been crabbing for food for generations, and prefers to eat her catch. “Casual Crabbing with Tia” is just that, but she’s aware it is her day-to-day setting, which clients find both breathtaking and therapeutic, that is unique to their experience.
The Cast Net Demo is at 11:30 a.m. on Friday morning. When you see Clark, be sure to ask her to show the tattoo on her leg, which she uses as a guide to know whether the crabs she catches are big enough to keep.
Like Clark, Kelsey Dick advocates sustainable eating through sportsmanship. “It’s been 4 years since I have bought meat from the store. All the meat I eat these days I harvest myself or trade friends for the meat they have harvested. These days that means lots of shrimp, fish, and oysters in these cooler months,” says Dick.
A native of Ohio, Dick works in recreational fisheries management for the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council. She studied biology before earning a master’s degree in marine and fisheries science. Growing up, her family would spend 2-3 weeks each summer on the surf and sound side of North Carolina in an RV.
“We always had multiple fishing rods cast, and threw cast nets, crabbed, and clammed. At night my little brother and I would go shark fishing with whatever we caught during the day,” says Dick. Her passion is fishing in the Lowcountry on her skiff. In January, Dick celebrated catching a redfish on a fly she tied, on her own boat.
On the one hand she is not interested in making all angling narratives about gender, but she’s equally conscious about recognizing tired and ingrained stereotypes. “On one trip, I had two friends on the boat, a man and a woman, and I heard myself directing a question about the motor only to the male.” She later apologized to her female friend for presuming to ask only the man when Dick had no basis for knowing his level of expertise, if any.
In 2018, Dick began hosting women’s fly tying nights in the Charleston area. December’s event sponsored by Haddrell’s Point Tackle drew the greatest participation to date. Together with Caroline Smith Irwin, Dick will be hosting the next Ladies Fly Fishing Night at Flood Tide Co. the week after her SEWE Cast Net Demo, on Fed 20, 2018 at 5:30 p.m. They will have stations set up to learn more about casting techniques, fly tying, knot tying, flats fishing and more. Flood Tide Co. is providing free drinks.
At Friday’s Cast Net Demo, Dick will also be giving tips on fall shrimping and deep holing in the Lowcountry.
July 27, 2018
Someone had to die so that we might have key lime pie, and key lime pie in its first incarnation experienced a kind of death of its own. The original pie had a life span of seventy years (1856–1926). What we eat now is a descendant of it, which is an odd thing to say about pie. After all, we imagine we could simply collect the ingredients now and that prior to 1856 a resourceful Key West cook might have assembled the ingredients herself if only she’d thought of it first. But the story of key lime pie isn’t a simple one.
We often think of recipes coalescing because of the migratory patterns of the peoples who first introduced them to new places or of indigenous ingredients like the key lime. Various version of sweet cream pie can be traced to the Shaker communities of Indiana. Apple pies or tarts have been around since the Middle Ages. Gail Borden patented sweetened condensed milk in 1854, and two years later we had key lime pie, so the birth of this pie was as much about this event in food technology as it was about the key lime.
I grew up on a picnic version of key lime pie popularized near the end of the twentieth century, after General Foods introduced Cool Whip in 1966. My grandmother blended a tub of the frozen whipped topping, a can of sweetened condensed milk, and a small Minute Maid frozen limeade and delighted us grandkids on hot summer afternoons at Lake Burton—a freshwater lake in North Georgia—with a taste that hinted at the tropical, the imagined otherness, and at margaritas we had not yet tasted. Like the pie itself and the memories of those childhood summers when we were all a tribe, to experience a thing that by nature is once here and then gone is best described as bittersweet.
The Oxford English Dictionary cites 1905 as the first year the term key lime came into usage, which seems late to me. To clarify: the key lime (Citrus aurantifolia swingle) is in a class all its own. Also called Mexican or West Indian limes, they are much smaller than Persian limes and range in size from that of a Ping Pong to a golf ball. Most of the world considers them the standard lime. It’s just the United States that now prefers Persian limes thanks to the choice in replanting after 1926.
Florida growers did not replant key limes after the 1926 hurricane that destroyed their groves. Their key limes gone, they planted Persian limes, which are more disease-resistant and heavier bearing, not to mention seedless. The key lime is more acidic than the Persian lime. The Persian lime is therefore less bitter, so to blend its juice with sweetened condensed milk, which is 40 percent sugar, isn’t as bittersweet. Now, only 10 percent of commercially available key limes in the United States come from southern Florida. The remaining 90 percent are sourced from Mexico and Guatemala, so you are far more likely to find Florida key limes growing in a Key West neighbor’s backyard than in a grocery store bin.
If you’re wondering whether it was a hurricane-related death that led to the birth of key lime pie, the answer is no. I will come to the pie’s inception momentarily. First, regarding the present: a descendant of key lime pie, my grandmother’s recipe can be found in a 1996 community cookbook called Guilty Pleasures: Collected Recipes of the Columbia Legal Association (of Columbia, South Carolina), and they called it “Payable Key Lime Pie.” It is the last of the key lime pies, the furthest one can get from the source. After all, it calls for not just cream but imitation cream.1 It would not make sense to consider my grandmother’s recipe an authentic attempt at key lime pie when looking at other iterations.
Those recipes, such as the one found in A Taste of Georgia published by the Newnan Junior Service League in 1977, call for ten egg yolks. The Taste of Georgia recipe calls also for green food coloring, an additive that makes southern Floridians wince. Authentic key lime pie, they say, is pale yellow. The other stuff is for dry-landers. What’s more, recipes vary regarding whether to bake the pie (the first key lime pies were unbaked)2 or what to use for crust (the first key lime pies were crustless). There are twists on the original as far-reaching as “David’s No Mistakin’ Bacon Key Lime Pie,” concocted by David L. Sloan, Key West’s authority on the subject of all things key lime pie. Personally, hearing of Sloan’s recipe marked for me a kind of limit to the pervasive assertion that everythingis better with bacon, but I haven’t tried it.
Bacon isn’t all Sloan came up with. In 2013, Phantom Press, which Sloan owns together with Christopher Schultz, published The Key Lime Pie Cookbook, in which he uses a formulaic approach to derive as many filling/crust combinations as possible for key lime pie. “Mix and match 20 crusts, 20 fillings, 20 toppings and 20 sauces,” Sloan writes, “to create more than 150,000 varieties of Key West’s signature dessert.” I am not sure why I find this so distasteful, except that Sloan’s other titles include Hangover Survival Guide and Don’t Do It! 101 Reasons NOT to Marry Her, the latter of which he and Schultz coauthored. Molly O’Neill’s profile of Sloan for epicurious.com, written while he was writing The Key Lime Pie Cookbook, offers some of Sloan’s story. O’Neill writes:
Sloan says it was while investigating reports of a ghost in the lavish mansion built by William “Bill Money” Curry in 1855 that [he] encountered the original recipe for Key lime pie. “I heard movement on the floor above,” he said, “but what stopped me cold was the recipe I saw in the pantry, the recipe for ‘Aunt Sally’s Key Lime Pie.'”
In case you are wondering if the movement Sloan heard on the floor above belonged to the ghost of the person who died so that we might have key lime pie, the answer is no. Or at least, I don’t think so. Curry and Aunt Sally are both figures in the history of key lime pie, but what I find endearingly half-baked about Sloan (other than his self-nomer of “Author, Entrepreneur, Paranormal Investigator”) is the way he places himself in the history of key lime pie. He goes on to say:
Most sources credit an anonymous “Aunt Sally” with inventing Key lime pie. Well, it turns out that Aunt Sally was the cook at the Curry Mansion and as soon as I saw that paper, my heart started racing and I started to shake. I knew, I just knew. It [sic] was like finding the Golden Fleece, the Holy Grail.
It’s unclear whether Sloan discovered the recipe or just saw what others already knew was there, and who granted him authority to take it. What we do know is that he quit the corporate world and moved to Key West some years ago, and he makes his living selling the stories of both key lime pie and ghosts. To Sloan, the recipe might have looked more like a golden parachute than a golden fleece.
William Curry was Key West’s first millionaire and began building the Curry mansion in 1855, a year after Gail Borden patented sweetened condensed milk. Borden launched the product in 1856, and the Union Army’s bulk purchases for rations ensured its success. Curry then began importing the cans to Key West, where sponge fishermen bought them and, while on their “hook boats”—named for the hooking method used to harvest the sponges—were able to blend key limes, pelican eggs, and the new milk-sugar blend where fresh milk would have quickly spoiled. (Sponge fishing occurred in the Keys’ shallow waters and was booming by the end of the nineteenth century, with a fleet of 350 hook boats employing more than 1,400 fishermen.) Historians tend to agree that Curry’s cook, Aunt Sally, probably got the recipe from the fishermen.
Borden did not stumble on the invention of sweetened condensed milk. Before his success, he risked and lost almost all his fortune canning his meat biscuit, a dehydrated meat mixed with flour. Marco Polo writings report that thirteenth-century Tatars condensed milk, and Nicholas Appart did the same in France in 1820. But it was Borden who added sugar to inhibit bacterial growth after heating the milk until about 60 percent of the water evaporated. Skim milk was used. Later, in 1905, this formula as a mainstay for young working-class children was blamed for contributing to a rash of rickets cases. Today, vitamin D is added.
Perhaps by now you’ve forgotten that someone died so that we might have key lime pie. I’ve taken the long road to this point because I fear if I were to just come right out and say it, you might overlook the gravity of the matter. For whatever reason—maybe because I started my search with the original key lime pie in mind, and perhaps on learning there was no predecessor of sweetened condensed milk—the search for the pie’s authentic recipe evolved into a search for the true story of the recipe.
Borden was on a transatlantic voyage in 1852 when he was inspired to invent sweetened condensed milk. The idea struck him for two reasons. First, he was prepared. He had tried and failed at meat biscuits. He’d lost a fortune. The man had canning on his mind. Second, the cows on the ship got sick, and this illness cut off the ship’s milk supply. After many days at sea, Borden’s thoughts regarding the demonstrated need to preserve milk surpassed those of his predecessors. Perhaps sick cows would not have been enough to fully harness Borden’s attention, but something else did. An infant baby died due to the lack of milk available. Here’s where you have to let your mind wander—to imagine a thing or two you cannot prove for certain—to connect the whole story. It’s unclear why the child would not have mother’s milk. News of the infant death must have spread throughout the ship. The news must have affected Borden, must have invoked empathy for the loss about which we won’t go so far as to say he was anywhere near, for there would have been a lot of passengers on the ship.
If an anonymous baby bound for distant shores had not died, we might never have had key lime pie, which serendipitously has a bittersweet taste. Key limes, however terrestrial, were named for tropical islands. The same Atlantic that brought Borden back from Europe churned up a storm seventy years later that wiped Florida’s key limes off the map. All ingredients combined, key lime pie’s story has a lot to do with the power of the sea to displace dry-landers. Cows crossing the ocean. Key limes tossed into the eye of the storm. For Gail Borden, empathy would have been a call to arms. In recalling his empathy, I found my own for Sloan, the paranormal researcher and key lime pie expert now woven into the history of the pie. Even he is from Dallas, Texas, another dry-lander at the mercy of the draw of the sea.
Of course, had that baby not died just as Borden’s mind was ripe for invention, sweetened condensed milk or something like it still would have eventually found its way into our world. It would have been after the boom for the first sponge fishermen of Florida subsided and the men left for other sponge fields in Mexican and Central American waters. The 1926 hurricane, we must assume, would still have hit. Just as cream-based pies evolved before them, sweetened condensed milk–based pies might have evolved in twentieth-century kitchens, and someone might have used first lemon juice, then lime.
Predictably, my why for this story has more to do with my own experience with key lime pie and the quests some of us go on to find the authentic. Sloan likened his discovery of Aunt Sally’s recipe to that of the Golden Fleece or the Holy Grail. Part of Greek mythology, the Golden Fleece is a symbol for authority or kingship. I couldn’t help but pick on Sloan for proclaiming himself the authority on, of all things, a pie, but I do understand where he is coming from. We recognize patterns and create meaning by connecting our personal to the universal. If any one of us were researching paranormal activity in a 150-year-old mansion and heard a “movement” upstairs just before we spotted a tattered piece of paper vaguely linked to History with a capital H, we would feel a part of it. My dad and I once entered the old, abandoned elementary school of his youth through the building’s crawl space, bumping our heads on the floor joists as we scooted along on our knees toward an opening he’d spotted. Afterward, we were covered in red clay, and everything we saw while we were there: a yellowing progress report, period hardware, even dust bunnies, made me feel like an archeologist, a discoverer of history, if not my own then my dad’s and that of these people once present, and my dad must have wanted to explore his past for the same reason I recall memories of eating key lime pie at Lake Burton. Few admirable characteristics can be associated with looking too squarely at the future, but gratitude is at least one reason we look back.
Above the doorway to my dad’s fifth-grade classroom hung a sign that said “Fifth Grade Room,” and we took it. I remember my dad climbing up to remove it from its station, and it now hangs on my kitchen wall. My grandfather ransacked the summer homes of Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels, and we now have the former’s china and the latter’s scrapbook. I understand Sloan lifting the key lime pie recipe. Ad victorem spolias.3
Yet perhaps unlike Sloan, my years have had the opposite effect of bequeathing authority. In its own way, our picnic key lime pie, the furthest thing from the real deal before broaching into the mutant territories of bacon-laced fillings and Captain Crunch crusts (another Sloan concoction), was as good as the original key lime pie of exotic shallow waters, the very first one cooked by a sponge fisherman leaning over a small stove, leather-skinned and mixing this new sweet milk with the juice of key limes he takes for granted, knowing a few pelican eggs will hold it together. Even the greatest imitation key lime pies retain something exotic and tropical that came across to children who could have barely known of such places.
* * *
1. In 2010, both skim milk and light cream were added to Original Cool Whip.
2. A family friend, Ray Otwell, was given a nearly identical recipe by his father with one alteration: cooking the pie ten minutes in a 400-degree oven, and noting that “real” (Persian) limes can be substituted by changing the cooking time to twenty to thirty minutes. The handwritten recipe is hard to understand, and this is the best sense I could make of it, speculating the suggestion of a longer cooking time might bring out more of the Persian lime’s flavor.
3. To the victor belong the spoils.
July 27, 2018
Bonefish spawn through an epic feat of polygynandrous love. From fall to late spring, they arrive in schools to nearshore spawning sites and fill their swim bladders with air, before heading offshore at night, diving deep, and surge back to the surface. The change in pressure causes their bladders to expand and release eggs and sperm into the water around them. Juvenile bonefish are hatched over a month later, in areas such as mangroves and bays, after having drifting back from offshore. The currents of the Florida Keys are a womb, a kind of amniotic fluid for bonefish. When the fish release eggs and sperm after diving 200 feet into offshore waters, they are counting on that water to be nutrient-dense and protective of their larvae. The same can be said of the nearshore spawning sites where the process begins with those first gasps of air.
The characteristics of bonefish spawning sites, called pre-spawning aggregations (or PSAs), were not even clear until 2011, says Dr. Ross Boucek, when a Bahamian site was discovered. That mystery is why Dr. Boucek, who serves as BTT Florida Keys Initiative Manager, is in the midst of his first season of tagging bonefish for a 3-year study. Much of the proposed Keys study is modeled after Bahamian research of the last two decades. While the Keys have seen a disappearance of fisheries, the Bahamas experienced only a slight decline as a world-class bone fishery and proactively put conservation efforts into place. While a perfect storm of factors may have contributed to the decline of Keys fisheries, finding the PSAs will help determine if bonefish are truly spawning less or if they are not reaching sexual potential much less crossing into maturing that equips them to spawn successfully.
photo by - Ian Wilson
Part of the year, Dr. Boucek works by moonlight in what has to be the most romantic job in bonefish conservation. The study began in November 2019, and in January, March, May and November of 2020 and 2021, he and a team of researchers from both BTT Florida International University are at Ballast Key field station for the six days leading up to the full moon, where they are running transects in 4-8’ deep areas to attempt to identify spawning sites. They are looking for bonefish rising for air, large schools swimming near the surface, and high numbers of sharks and other predators. Drones are used in light of Bahamian studies which had more success with this method than sonar, with researchers following some 300 feet behind in a center console. Each day in the field from mid-afternoon onward, the team collects roughly 80 minutes of footage in 20-minute segments.
Declining bonefish populations in the Keys is among the very reasons BTT was founded, but a surge of sightings in recent years shows signs of promise. According to the BTT Bonefish Genetics Study which concluded in 2014, bonefish from Belize, Mexico, Cuba, and Florida are highly related. The decline or sustainability in one area of spawning sites could affect the entire regional population. Dr. Boucek’s work is the next step in pinpointing which sites to protect.
The water quality of the Everglades, Florida Bay, and the Florida Keys and habitat destruction play key roles in the decline of bonefish spawning sites in the Keys, and allow for the clearest intervention. Bonefish fisheries contribute significantly to the economy of the Keys, and the argument for protecting them need not be a moral one. Florida’s economy depends on clean, healthy water and a clean environment.
When something like the red tide breaks out and half the tourist run choking and gagging into the hotels for days because of all the dead fish on the west coast, every event like that caused by pollution and water quality issues, whether it’s the bad water coming out of the Caloosahatchee River to Lake Okeechobee or going into the Indian River lagoon the other direction toward St. Lucie, it still has a tremendous financial impact and a tremendous impact on tourism and the image of Florida.
Dr. Boucek hypothesizes bonefish migrate west of the Keys “to maximize self-recruitment to Florida.” By fishing 30 adults (10 each in the Upper, Middle, and Lower Keys) and placing an acoustic transmitter the size of a AA battery inside the abdomen before releasing them back into the wild—an astoundingly quick process critical for not traumatizing the bonefish—Dr. Boucek can monitor the Keys population and begin to locate yet undiscovered spawning sites. BTT and other researchers have thousands of acoustic receivers moored to the ocean floor around the Keys, and when a tagged bonefish swims by one, the date and time pings the receiver.
photo by - Ian Wilson
As the study progresses, it might become possible to detect if bonefish return to the same spawning site, how the decline in habitat is affecting spawning sites, whether viruses and contaminants play a role, and other key conservation questions. Anglers have reported three possible sites. Simply identifying the spawning sites will allow for the identification and subsequent alleviation of their stressors.
To learn more about the work being done check it out HERE.