Maryland officials have cut the catch number for yellow perch by 50% for recreational anglers. In our weekly series with the Bay Journal Don Rush talks with associate editor and senior writer Tim Wheeler about the decision and the causes for concern.
RUSH: Yellow Perch have been struggling for years in the Chesapeake Bay. This is Don Rush. The Maryland Department of the Environment has stepped in to reduce the number that recreational anglers can catch. In our weekly series with the Bay Journal, we talked with associate editor and senior writer Tim Wheeler on the latest decision by state officials.
WHEELER: They put out a notice to the public late last year asking for advice on potential reductions in the recreational catch. They gave 'em a choice between a slot limit, which is to say a minimum size and a maximum size and the fish you keep had to be within that. There was no closed season, you could catch 'em anywhere you wanted to, but there was a ten fish daily creel limit, ten fish a day that you could keep and the nine inch minimum size. At that time, the comments that got back, they were across the board, but there seemed to be a majority of them that favored the idea of simply lowering the number of fish you could keep or bring home. And so that went from ten to five as of January 8th of this year.
RUSH: So how does the commercial fishing industry fit into all of this?
WHEELER: The department did in fact bump up the commercial quota this year by a few thousand pounds. We're talking about a total fishery of about 18,000 pounds. So not a lot. And they're only allowed to catch them in the upper bay and in the Chester and Patuxent Rivers to a smaller degree. Information is, there's less than ten, perhaps six active commercial fishing operations out there for yellow perch. And they basically are hoping from December through March, assuming they don't catch all the quota and if they catch the quota before that, then they're shut down. So the department said basically they thought that they needed to sort of give them a little bit more opportunity to catch the fish because a number of the watermen, it said basically there's so few fish out there, there's almost not worth going to get 'em onto the regime they had. So most of the fish that are caught rich, you don't see them in the seafood markets as a general rule. They're sold out of state either to New York, to the fish markets up there or shipped live to stock freshwater lakes and ponds generally out in the Midwest where there're very popular fish.
RUSH: So finally, in terms of the reasons for this decline or this difficulty in terms of its population, what's going on with that?
WHEELER: There is some research that has suggested that [in] Yellow Perch reproduction, the eggs and the young may not survive. And they've looked at some of the western shore tributaries, the Severn for instance, and the Magothy and that area. Fish still show up there, I mean I've seen them myself making their runs up the streams, but the information is that the eggs either don't hatch or the young don't survive. There's some linkage that they make between the amount of development and the upstream spawning reaches areas. And so there's a possible linkage here with contaminated runoff or temperature changes because of the runoff. So that's one potential connection there that's impacting that recruitment issue of the young surviving to adulthood. It's not clear that the blue catfish are gobbling them all up, but they certainly occupy the same area. Blue catfish are all the way up the bay and they're in the same general areas where the yellow perch are. There's a possible linkage there, but the one clear one or semi clear anyway, is this connection between development of the watershed, of the spawning reaches areas and the lack of reproductive success.
RUSH: Bay Journal's associate editor and senior writer Tim Wheeler on curbing the harvest of the Yellow Perch by recreational anglers in the Chesapeake Bay. This is Don Rush for Delmarva Public Media.
