Catch of the day evolves as climate changes

From June 2016-2019, commercial fishermen caught more black sea bass than in the 32 previous years combined. Source: Hannes Baumann, PhD Associate Professor | Fisheries & Evolutionary Ecology UCONN Department of Marine Sciences

By Theresa Sullivan Barger, Special to The Day

As lobster populations in Long Island Sound have plummeted and black sea bass populations have exploded because of climate change, commercial fishermen from Stonington, New London and other coastal communities have adapted.

“Fishermen are resilient. Fishermen are problem solvers,” said Joe Gilbert, owner of Empire Fisheries in Stonington. “Given the opportunity, we’ll find our way through this.” People who earn their living from the sea have found a variety of ways.

Gilbert started with one small boat in 1982 and now owns four boats and holds three licenses to fish for scallops, squid and mixed fish.

Lobstermen like Stonington father-son team Mike and Roddy Grimshaw began catching conch, or whelk. People can call or text their order a few days in advance and meet their boat, Lady Lynn, at the Stonington Town Dock.

Gilbert and his peers worked with state regulators to get their sea bass quota increased.

Several opted to work with the offshore wind industry while wind farms are being built along the Eastern seaboard.

A handful are supplying local and New York restaurants with lesser-known, unregulated fish since quotas on regulated fish limit days at sea and catch size.

And some are setting up ocean farms raising kelp, oysters, mussels or scallops or a combination.

People from outside the fishing community are trying to help as well. Chefs have led the farm-to-table movement by cooking with locally sourced, fresh ingredients and that grew into the public supporting farmers markets and buying Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) shares. They're replicating that model with fish for the 'sea to table' initiative.

Sea to Table

Fishermen said they would like to catch more unregulated, underutilized fish and sell them locally, but they face multiple challenges. The average home cook doesn’t know they’re delicious and how to cook them, Gilbert said.

“If I knew what people wanted, I would start with that,” he said. “We need to find a way to get the population to eat whiting, porgy, sea robin. … We’ve been talking about this for what feels like 10 years.”

Local fishermen have worked with Stonington Fresh Initiative to try to create a buzz around fresh local seafood. They appreciate the handful of restaurant chefs who are buying local seafood, but to make it financially viable, he said, more restaurants, grocery stores and consumers need to embrace the concept.

“I grew up in Milford, where there were clam shacks. They always had some kind of fried whiting. Folks from the neighborhood could get a fish sandwich,” Gilbert said. “I want to see that go to the masses.”

In New Bedford, Mass., fish stew made from these lesser-known fish is commonplace, he said.

“I’d love to start with reeducating the whole world ― consumers, elected officials, regulators,” Gilbert said.

Several local chefs are working on educating their customers by serving them locally caught plentiful fish and letting customers’ tastebuds be their guide.

For the past decade, a growing number of chefs in New London County and nearby Washington County, R.I., have been cooking with fish that are plentiful and locally caught to support the fishing industry and practice sustainability.

Each week, chef David Standridge buys 100 pounds of fish landed in Stonington from local distributor Sea Well.

“Most fish are delicious. It’s just getting them to order it,” said the co-owner of Shipwright’s Daughter in Mystic who won the James Beard award for Best Chef Northeast in June.

The first night he put sea robin on the menu, the menu included black sea bass. Nobody ordered the sea robin; they all picked the sea bass. The next night, the only fish on the menu was sea robin and people ordered it.

“Now it’s easy for us to sell sea robin. Sometimes you have to trick them and sometimes you have to force them,” he said. “The first couple of years, we probably sold more burgers. Now that we’ve had four years of putting it out there, most people are on board.”

He doesn’t have to, but Standish pays his supplier the same amount per pound for less “valuable” fish than more well-known species as an investment in maintaining his supply of local fish. After all, he said, he charges about $35 per entree regardless of the type of fish.

He’s on the board of Eating with the Ecosystem and gives classes to other chefs on how to prepare dogfish, sea robin and green crabs. Eating sustainable seafood means diversifying the seafood you eat, he said. Popular fish ― shrimp, tuna, salmon, cod and haddock ― are not sustainable species, he said.

He purchases sugar kelp, which is native to Long Island Sound, from the Stonington Kelp Company and the New England Kelp Cooperative. Since kelp, oysters and mussels clean the water and can be grown vertically in the same plot of water, buying from kelp farmers also helps the fishermen, he said.

Another Stonington chef, Whitecrest Eatery’s Johan Jensen, tries to talk with his customers and introduce them to fish that are new to them. For example, he said, he tells his customers that if they like monkfish, they’ll like sea robin.

Originally from Denmark, he was surprised to see Cape Cod fishermen cut off the heads of monkfish and throw them to the harbor seals. “The cheeks are the most prized piece of fish in Scandinavia,” he said. “A lot of the fish that are not popular here are super popular where I’m from.” He rattled off herring, mackerel and porgy (or scuff) that can be pan-fried.

He hopes that introducing these fish to his customers encourages them to try them at home, he said, and he’d like to see cooking classes for home cooks.

He also buys most of his fish from Sea Well Seafood of Stonington, which has the staff to cut the fish ― something high-volume restaurants don’t have time to do, he said. “The reason why the big restaurants don’t buy hyper-sustainable fish is because they’re going to have to cut it themselves.”

Taking a risk

Since fishermen face haul limits, if they’re going to land (or sell) sustainable fish in Stonington or New London, they have to know they’re going to get enough money per pound to cover their expenses.

Increasing sustainable fishing practices to support local fishermen and help the climate is a chicken or egg dilemma, said Kate Masury, executive director of Eating with the Ecosystem, a “New England seafood system that supports the region’s marine ecosystems and the people who depend on them.”

For anyone, there’s a risk. But the consumer faces the lowest risk because the worst outcome would be buying from their local fish market and not liking it.

“Some of these less popular species are less money, so pricewise, they tend to be very affordable,” she said.

Restaurants face a larger risk, because they have to order at least 10 pounds of a particular fish, and if their customers don’t buy it, they’ve lost money in a business with thin profit margins. The fishermen risk devoting limited storage space on their boat and if the seafood dealer won’t buy it or offers a low price, they’ve lost money after spending $3 a gallon in fuel through a cooperative and paying their crew, she said.

“A lot of fishermen take pride in feeding their communities and care about sustainability,” she said. “I don’t think it’s too late [for local fishermen.] I think there’s opportunities for things to change around. I’ve seen a lot of positive examples of things. I’d love to see us moving in these positive directions. … We end up working with a lot of college-age students. They’re so interested in sustainability.”

Decline of licensed fishermen

Despite multiple efforts, the number of commercial fishing licenses held by New London County residents has declined by 34%, from 102 in 2016 to 67 this year, state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) records show.

Local fishermen face competition from peers up and down the Eastern seaboard and large, often less-regulated fishing operations around the world. About 80% of seafood consumed in the U.S. comes from abroad, primarily from Canada, Chile, India, Indonesia and Vietnam, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Those who land their fish in Stonington, New London and other Connecticut ports are subject to strict quotas on the amount of fish they can bring in per year and when they can fish for some species. But some other countries have colossal commercial fishing operations where they fish continuously with gigantic nets, refueling at sea.

Local fishermen say they are like the small, independent farmers trying to eke out a living while factory farms receive tax benefits and subsidies local farms could only dream of.

Warmer waters threaten fish and livelihoods

For the past century, oceans have warmed by an average of 0.14 degrees Fahrenheit each decade, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency. This has changed the migration patterns of Long Island Sound fish such as winter flounder and lobster. In the course of the past 30 years, fishermen have seen the winter flounder population in Long Island Sound dwindle, said Gary Yerman, who has fished in the region for 50 years.

Pesticides sprayed to kill mosquitoes carrying the West Nile virus ended up in Long Island Sound, attacking lobsters' reproductive and skeletal structure, he said. Lobstermen were pulling up their pots full of dead lobster, he said, and tens of thousands of dead lobsters were found on the ocean floor.

To protect the lobsters that remain, the state DEEP fisheries division, in consultation with local fishermen, increased the minimum size of lobster that can be harvested and in 2013 prohibited the landing of lobster from Sept. 8 to Nov. 28 to help the lobsters survive, said Colleen Bouffard, supervising fisheries biologist, with DEEP’s Marine Fisheries Program.

“Those are the periods of the warmest water temperatures,” Bouffard said. ”There are already stressful conditions for lobster at that time of year. We decided it was a good time of year for closure.”

The remaining lobstermen work part-time and do something else to augment their income, she said. Some added conch (or whelk) fishing because it also involves traps and there’s been an increased abundance of whelks.

Sea bass explosion

“Among the U.S. Northeast regions, the largest and most rapid increase (in sea bass) has occurred in Long Island Sound,” said Hannes Baumann, associate professor, Fisheries & Evolutionary Ecology at UConn’s Department of Marine Sciences in Groton. “The last four years of the Long Island Sound spring trawl survey (May-June 2016-2019) have caught more black sea bass than the 32 previous years combined.”

While the quotas for catching black sea bass have increased, there’s a downside to its population explosion here: black sea bass eats small crustaceans and small fish, impacting the food chain.

In addition to black sea bass, Connecticut waters now contain more Mid-Atlantic species, notably scup and summer flounder, Bouffard said. Other locally available fish are: sea robin, slipper snails, dogfish and invasive green crab.

Diversifying with kelp, oysters or mussels

A few fishermen and lobstermen have supplemented their income by growing kelp or oysters and others entered that sustainable business, said Masury, from Eating with the Ecosystem.

Stonington Kelp Co. co-founders Suzie Flores and her husband, Jay Douglas, began a native sugar kelp farm in 2017, learning from Connecticut GreenWave, an organization that helps ocean farmers learn and get established. Kelp is nutritious for people, helps clean the oceans and has multiple beneficial uses. It also provides a habitat for fish.

A former commercial fisherman, Bren Smith, co-founded GreenWave after establishing a business raising sugar kelp and developing a system called restorative 3-D ocean farming. His memoir, “Eat Like a Fish: My Adventures as a Fisherman Turned Restorative Ocean Farmer” (Knopf, 2019), won a James Beard Award in writing. At a 40-acre leased plot in the ocean off the Thimble Islands, Smith raises oysters, mussels and scallops, all of which help clean the water.

With multiple players working together to support New London County fishermen, there's room for improvement. Standridge, formerly a New York chef, said once enough restaurants in a region have developed recipes for lesser-known fish, he'd like to replicate the CSA system for restaurants that operates out of Montauk, New York.

Chefs sign up for 50, 100 or 150 pounds of fresh local fish per week. This provides fishermen with a guaranteed market.

"You get what you get," he said.

Sure, it was challenging at first, when he wasn't sure how to prepare a given fish, he said.

"Now, any species of fish, we've prepared it four different ways," Standridge said.