by Jeremy Wade
In the places where commercial fishing on rivers is still a free-for-all, fishermen are scratching around for ever-diminishing returns. In western Zambia I’ve seen them reduced to using mosquito netting, to capture fish just a couple of inches long. Nothing gets a chance now to grow any bigger. Elsewhere long-overdue regulations and close seasons are attempting to save this way of life and the fish populations that it depends on. But enforcement is patchy, to say the least. There are a few success stories, such as the return of white sturgeon to the lower Columbia River in the north-west of the US in the second half of the twentieth century, but the populations of most river fish, it’s safe to say, will never return to anything like ‘natural’ levels–whatever they were before people started harvesting them.
Most of this is going unreported. But my thirty-five years of travels have given me a unique window on things. Although scientists have scarcely studied what’s happened to river fish populations, there is a rich oral history, everywhere in the world, telling the same story: of a precipitous decline in fish numbers and sizes in just the last hundred years or so. It’s a decline that’s confirmed by my own experience.
Although watching my River Monsters programs might give the impression that every far-flung river is full of man-sized beasts capable of biting your leg off or pulling you under, such fish are in fact very hard to find and catch. Many of the iconic underwater predators have all-but disappeared from most of their historic ranges. To find a large specimen you normally have to go to very specific, special places, normally where they have some degree of protection. Mere remoteness is not enough. And because many of the fish I go after are apex predators, the fish at the top of the underwater food pyramid, they are also indicators of the state of the river as a whole. If they are thriving, the chances are that so is everything else. But if they are missing, it is cause for wider concern. With this in mind, their absence from the places where they used to be found seems to point to a corresponding crisis among the supporting fish species. All this corroborates the sorry story that the old timers almost everywhere are telling.
This is the global context that recreational fishing–angling–now finds itself in. But many people have no idea how depleted and vulnerable freshwater fish are. There are still romantic, anachronistic notions about taking your catch home to eat. An extreme manifestation of this is found in Germany and Switzerland, where releasing your catch, if it is in season and over a certain minimum size, is illegal. Doing so can land you with a heavy fine or even in prison. So it’s not just in places that harbor secret terrorist training camps where a catch-and-release angler can get in trouble with the police. This regulation purports to be about animal welfare: catching fish should be utilitarian, for food, and not about human enjoyment. But this justification unravels on closer inspection.
What’s interesting is that culinary enjoyment is apparently OK. Or I might have got this wrong. Maybe you mustn’t enjoy the taste, or at least tell the police that you don’t, if they come asking. Although why anybody in twenty-first-century Europe would want to go to the time and expense of catching and eating fish that they find unpalatable is beyond me, when they can go hunter-gathering in a supermarket. From the point of view of the fish on the line, though, this is academic. Thanks to lobbyists who claim to care about animal welfare, the law decrees that it is kinder to kill a fish than it is to put it back in the water.
I find myself imagining what would happen in my home waters, here in the UK, if anglers had to kill and eat all the fish they caught, even if there was a minimum size. In the world of the people who frame the German and Swiss laws, the fish would keep on coming, from the miraculous underwater cornucopia. Meanwhile in the real world, the world of lots of people and not much water, I’d give it a year–if that–until UK waters were as good as devoid of fish. (Then people would give up angling, and at least there’d be no one to tell us that the rivers were dead, which would be a result of sorts.) That this hasn’t played out so far in Germany is maybe, I’m told, because German anglers can be somewhat excitable and inattentive when they land a fish. And the fish, instead of accepting their legal status as meals-to-be, and dutifully lying still, sometimes wriggle out of their captors’ hands and back into the water. Perhaps the fish welfare people should be on call to kill the fish themselves.
As a general trend, though, for all its strangeness as a concept, catch-and-release angling is on the increase in fresh water, in many parts of the world, while subsistence fishing and commercial fishing inevitably decline. And the reason is simple. Without people voluntarily returning their catches, fish populations in most places would be doomed.
For an angler, caring about fish numbers also has to translate into caring for individual fish. Some people argue that, to that end, we shouldn’t catch fish at all, even if we justify it by planning to eat them. This is because a hook in the mouth would cause pain to a human, and so it’s clear, so the argument goes, that it must be the same for a fish. But many fish put all sorts of spiky things in their mouths, things that I would defy any human to try to eat, such as live crabs and crayfish. Ask indigenous Australians what is the best bait for freshwater sawfish (Pristis pristis, elsewhere known as the largetooth sawfish), and they will tell you that it’s a catfish. The catfish in question has three sharp spikes sticking out of its body: one on its dorsal fin and one on each pectoral fin. Each spike carries multiple barbs, plus a coating of toxic slime–it’s like the most vicious treble hook imaginable. Yet sawfish voluntarily inhale the whole thing, to get at the catfish’s juicy flesh. It really makes you think–or it should do.
Still with sawfish, when I was on the Fitzroy River in Western Australia in 2010, filming with scientists from Murdoch University in Perth, we witnessed something else that challenges the assumption that fish sensations are the same as human sensations. With some fish it’s easy to recognize individual specimens. Mirror carp are easily identified by their scale patterns, which are as distinct as any fingerprint. But with most species it’s not easy to tell different individuals apart, if they are the same size. Sometimes there might be distinguishing marks, if you look carefully: the pattern of spots on a pike, a bifurcated tentacle on a catfish, a blemish somewhere on the body. If you have a good memory, or a good photograph, it’s possible to recognize a capture as a known fish. But most people don’t look at fish that closely, and wouldn’t recognize a fish that they’d caught before. And they wouldn’t be concerned about this, because to them it’s academic–it has no practical relevance.
But it’s not academic to academics. If scientists can recognize a fish as one that has been caught before, this can yield information about behavior and growth rate. (Has it stayed in the same area or migrated? Does it have a healthy food supply?) Meanwhile, the proportion of fish that are recaptures, versus fish that are showing up for the first time, gives an insight into population size. Lots of new fish indicates a large population, while lots of recaptures means a smaller population. But to get this info you have to positively ID the fish. Scientists do this by using tags.
Some modern tags are highly sophisticated, like the one we attached to a six-gill shark off Ascension Island. This recorded depth, temperature and light levels and transmitted this information to a satellite when it popped off and floated to the surface after thirty days. A tag like this costs a couple of thousand dollars, plus the satellite time, so scientists don’t get their hands on very many. But tags for basic identification are much cheaper. The simplest is the spaghetti tag, which is anchored at one end under the fish’s skin and trails a length of flexible plastic carrying a unique identification number and contact information. More pleasing cosmetically are microchip implants, similar to those used to identify pets, but you can only read the ID number if you have a scanner. For the sawfish, we were going low-tech, using plastic tags attached to the first dorsal fin.
The river had long been smothered in darkness when my line started running out. On my heavy gear the fight was short, but strang
e. I could feel a jarring side-to-side movement and something raking against my wire leader. Within a few minutes, a seven-foot sawfish was in the margins, at which point things got a bit more complicated. We had to extract the hook without getting sideswiped, get measurements and a fin clipping for DNA analysis, and get the tag in–all the while being alert for any saltwater croc lunging out of the river behind us. In other words, it was in everybody’s interest to act quickly. Not for the first time, I wondered what the fish made of this procedure, this abduction and release by air-breathing aliens, and what would be going through its mind when it was once more at liberty.
What I wasn’t expecting was what happened next. Within the next twenty-four hours, the same fish was caught again–twice–on handlines set by the indigenous Australian rangers who were working with us. Without the tag, we’d have assumed these captures were three different fish. This doesn’t suggest a fish that is distressed, at least not distressed enough to pass up the chance of another free meal. I’ve witnessed a similar thing with carp in the UK (see Chapter 19), catching the same large fish within forty-eight hours.
I’m not inferring from this that catching a fish doesn’t cause it any distress, but it does strongly suggest that this might be much less than many people assume. I’ve already recommended imagining you are a fish, as a way to locate and deceive them more successfully, but this only works if you remember the obvious: that fish are very different from us, in physiology and behavior. They are not people, and they don’t have the same level of consciousness. But why stop the thought experiment there? When I try to inhabit the mind and body of a hooked fish, the thing that looms largest is not the hook, but the confusion, the unseen force. If the fish has not been hooked before, it has no understanding of what is happening–although it might have seen other fish behaving in an inexplicably agitated way, and have some realization that now the same thing is happening to them. And that thing, in their perception, is clearly a bad thing, so it will resist that force with all its strength.
This is another reason to use tackle that is appropriate. Get the fish in as quickly as possible, so it does not get too tired. The priority is to leave the fish as unaffected as possible by the process of being caught. To that end, also observe all the norms of good fish care. If it’s a very large fish, it’s best not to remove it from the water. Otherwise: a knotless landing net, then a smooth, wet surface (ideally an unhooking mat) and wet hands, to avoid removing protective slime. A moist cloth or part of the net over their eyes can also help to keep them calm, or at least ensure that they are shaded from bright light, if they have come from dark or cloudy water. Disgorger, forceps or pliers should be readily to hand, and the hook should come out easily if it is barbless or has a micro-barb or a barb that has been squashed down. Maybe pour some water over the fish to keep it wet, but the main thing is to be careful and quick. Finally, support the fish in the water until it can hold itself upright and swim off under its own steam. These are the basics, which most anglers should know.
Add filming to the mix and things get a bit more complicated. We want people to see the fish–really see it, in its entirety and up close–because in many cases viewers have never seen this animal before, and had no idea of its existence. Normally filming tends to be a stop-start process, often repeating the same thing several times from different angles–but that can’t happen now. We have to get it right first time. Because we are dealing with a live animal out of its element and the clock is ticking, the process can have the feel of a Formula One pit stop, with the camera just picking up whatever shots it can. So compared with other parts of the program, the climax can seem a bit ragged; but this, to my mind, better conveys the emotion of the catch, and underlines the importance of returning the fish quickly.
In fact, so important is a speedy release that we sometimes employ trick filming to achieve this. It’s something I don’t mind owning up to, and explaining. Normally the final, edited version of me holding a fish, and talking about it, cuts between three kinds of shot. First, a wide shot of me plus the whole fish, to show its size. Second, close-ups of the fish, to show features such as eyes and scales. Third, close-ups of my face, looking down at the fish and up to camera, to deliver information. At times the tight shots of me are not all they seem. If you were to pull out, you would see that I’m not holding the fish at all, but something like a heavy plastic box. The fish has gone; it’s back in the water, and we’re doing this after the event. So it’s slight fakery, but it gives the fish early freedom. I like to think that anglers will forgive this slight dishonesty.
But caring about fish inevitably brings us into deeper water, where suddenly we feel out of our depth and conflicted. If we profess to care about fish but don’t care about the state of the water they live in, and the effects that our multitudinous waste products are having on that water, then that is an inconsistent position. I get the feeling though that many people, and not just anglers, do care about this; but this is not as evident as it could be because of widespread self-censorship. This is because anyone questioning the rationale of ever-increasing consumption tends to be portrayed as an extremist who wants to force everyone to live in caves. It’s a crude but effective misrepresentation, which makes people mostly keep their heads down–and it also deflects attention from where the real fundamentalism lies. (The other common misdirection is to change the conversation to one about over-population, and to blame the planet’s problems on people who, per capita, consume next to nothing.) But what alternative is there on offer to the central belief of the world’s new fundamentalist religion, that ever increasing consumption is perfectly compatible with a finite planet?
The central problem is that governments, even those that are nominally democratic, are primarily answerable to the owners of capital. Because of this, they don’t just protect capital; they promote its relentless concentration, by keeping everybody else in debt, and dutifully paying interest throughout their lives. And one way to keep creating this debt is to drive consumption and waste. So don’t expect any change from business as usual anytime soon, at least not in the top-down direction. Meanwhile any call for some new and more imaginative thinking is met by a diversionary lecture about jobs, although these are conveniently forgotten about at other times. Whatever happens, of course, we have no choice but to be consumers. We all need a place to live, food to eat, the means to move around, and occasional entertainment. But within these areas, and elsewhere, we do have considerable choice, to operate in a way that is more truly democratic, a way that works from the bottom up.
All of which is easy for me to say, but how do I square this with flying tens of thousands of miles every year with five or six other people and their baggage? As it turns out, there are those in the film and television industry who recognize that it’s time to try to operate in a different way. The production company I work with is signed up with a pioneering UK-based scheme (wearealbert.org) whereby all the company’s productions calculate and report carbon usage. In doing so they aim to reduce the environmental impact of the whole production process–everything from using refillable water bottles and not using disposable plastic to keeping travel miles down by employing in-country crew members. And in my personal life I try to further redress the balance. My car is nearly twenty years old, but because it still works I am loath to throw it on the scrapheap. And although I eat meat, I do so very rarely, which goes a little way to reducing the amount of the earth’s surface that’s given over to growing crops to feed livestock. (Recent studies reveal that cutting down on meat and dairy products is the single biggest thing that most of us can do to reduce our impact on the planet and its wild animals.) It’s another checklist running quietly in the background, a personal audit, which is not about being uncomfortable and miserable, but shaving back, here and there, on unnecessary consumption and wastefulness.
It comes down to thinking independently about how we act, which should be the big thing that angling teaches us to do. Instead of defining ourselves,
and others, according to what we possess and how much we spend–our obsession with numbers again–we can try to tread a little more lightly on the world. We don’t have to live in caves, and renounce the benefits of technology. But we can go against the direction in which we are being pushed, and dial back, even if it’s just a little, on our consumption and our dependence on possessions. It’s a scary idea, because it goes against how we’ve been conditioned to address our insecurities. But if we each do what we can, all the untold millions of us who despair at the world’s present trajectory, the cumulative effect is not so small.
It’s something that could help the fish, and us, be around for a little longer.
22
(Notes to Self)
We think we’ll remember everything important but we don’t. We need extra capacity for the things that will, over time, fade, degrade, corrupt, and plain drop out of our heads. Some of those things will be details of our time on the water that may help us to catch fish in the future. How did I rig that bait, exactly? What strength line did I use to attach the weight, so it would break free if it became snagged–but not snap off on the cast? How many seconds did I let the lure sink, before I started to retrieve? What was the weather like when that fish finally took?