Fish Returning

December 17, 2006

Release from: Al Jones
The Sun Herald (Mississippi)

OCEAN SPRINGS - It's been more than 15 months since Hurricane Katrina slammed its way onshore, wreaking havoc from Alabama to Louisiana.

The storm damaged infrastructure and left many fishermen wondering what the long-term effects would be on speckled trout and water quality.

Those questions and others will be addressed Tuesday night as the Gulf Coast Research Lab presents the 2006 Workshop on Mississippi's Marine Fisheries. The 7 p.m. workshop will take place in the Caylor Auditorium on 73 East Beach Drive in Ocean Springs.

"We will have a well-rounded set of talks from spotted sea trout (specks) to fish havens to post-Katrina water monitor qualities," Gulf Coast Research Lab assistant research scientist Read Hendon said.

The top subjects will include numbers on the speckled trout stock and enhancement programs as well as update data on the tripletail tagging program.

A recent releasing of trout in Fort Bayou was part of a pioneering stock enhancement program that's a cooperative effort between the lab and the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources.

Other subjects to be discussed include: sidescan sonar assessments of Katrina's impacts on the fish havens, shark research in the northwest portion of the Gulf of Mexico and water quality.

One issue to be discussed in terms of tripletail will be size and bag limits. Currently, there are no limits on tripletail, also known as blackfish, and Hendon said that could hamper the low-tagging numbers.

Dr. Jim Franks, known nationally for the Cobia Tag and Release Program, will offer his view on tripletail.

"Jim will talk about age and growth and where we are headed to establishing some management for Mississippi tripletail," Hendon said. "We are about the only state with any management.

"I will give a brief overview of triple tagging in Mississippi waters. There were a lot of tripletail's this year and since we had no size or bag limits, it was hard to get people to tag them.

"That (regulations) is what we saw in cobia and we hope the same things happens with tripletail. After the legal size and numbers are in the ice box, fishermen will take more for us."

The workshop, which started in 1992, will once again center around speckled trout, the state's most sought-after saltwater species. Despite the loss of habitat and baitfish to Katrina, Hendon said the summer and fall season was still exceptional.

Thanks to a program designed to raise and release juvenile speckled trout, the future looks bright, too.

"We've had some good success raising and the releasing the fish in places like Davis Bayou," Hendon said. "We haven't received much from our tagging program but through routine monitoring, we're seeing a high number of fish this year.

" However, they seem to be smaller and that could be a number of factors like food and resource limitations after Katrina. It's obvious that we expected to see higher numbers of spotted sea trout because there was no fishing for several months after Katrina.

"Everything seems to be fine. It's unfortunate that commercial and recreational fisheries were hit so hard and lost a lot of infrastructure. But little fishing pressure following Katrina helped that."

What kind of oddball twists can one expect to hear from the panel during the workshop?

"We did collect our oldest spotted sea trout in our data base," Hendon said. "I don't want to give anything away, but it was nine years old and caught in one of our (lab) nets. Show up and we'll tell you how long it was, the sex of the fish and how much it weighed."