By PATRICK WHITTLE
https://apnews.com/article/conch-overfishing-saving-food-extinction-bahamas-08c4c37a1a1429636186e046eb92bda1
FREEPORT, Bahamas (AP) — Tereha Davis, whose family has been fishing for clams in the waters around the Bahamas for five generations, recalls stepping into the water from the beach and picking up sea slugs from the sea floor.
But in recent years, Davis, 49, and clam fishers like her have had to stray further and further from shore — sometimes as far as 30 miles — to find the molluscs that the Bahamas eat fried, steamed, smoked and raw and are a pillar of it Economy and tourism industry of the island nation.
Scientists, international conservationists and government officials have sounded the alarm that the mussel population is dwindling due to overfishing and a foodstuff central to the Bahamas’ diet and identity may no longer be commercially viable in just six years.
“When I was a kid, we never had to go that far to get clams,” Davis said, speaking at a Freeport market where she was selling her catch. “What shall we do without a shell?”
The conch’s potential demise reflects the threat that overfishing around the world poses to traditional foods. Such losses are among the most glaring examples of how overfishing has changed people’s lives – how they work, what they eat, how they define themselves.
The overfishing challenges facing the Bahamas are reflected in places as diverse as Senegal, where overfishing has wiped out the white grouper, long the basis for the national dish thieboudienne, and the Philippines, where they eat small fish like sardines used in exhausted kinilaw, a raw dish similar to ceviche.
No longer a theoretical threat, overfishing has wiped out once-abundant species and removed beloved culturally important dishes from the table forever. And it’s a growing problem — the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization has said more than a third of the world’s fish stocks are overfished and rates of unsustainable fishing are rising.
Government organizations and advocacy groups are working to stop illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing that has accelerated species loss. They blame poaching, poor regulation and a lack of enforcement of existing laws. Regulators like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US have said reducing illegal fishing is vital to prevent popular food options from being lost.
The potential loss of clams in the Bahamas reflects the threat that overfishing around the world poses to traditional foods. Nowhere is seafood more synonymous than in the Bahamas with conch. Overfishing also threatens the national dish in Senegal. (April 6) (AP Video: Serginho Roosblad/Grace Ekpu)
The loss of such foods threatens the availability of protein and iron in the diets of people in poor countries and changes the course of culture in rich and poor countries, said Richard Wilk, professor emeritus in Indiana University’s Department of Anthropology, who studies food cultures has. Nations that don’t control overfishing risk repeating the mistakes of countries like Japan, where herring fisheries collapsed in the mid-20th century, costing jobs, reducing access to traditional wedding food and leaving the country dependent on foreign supplies, he said .
But the toll is highest in developing countries and poorer communities.
“The way environmental change and overfishing affect people and cuisine is different for subsistence fishermen who may be starving or local marketers, like the women who smoke fish on the beaches of West Africa,” Wilk said.
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This story was supported with funding from the Walton Family Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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Few countries are as synonymous with seafood as the Bahamas is with clams. Queen conch, the main food species, is a sea slug that grows up to 30 cm long and can live for 30 years. The shells are conical with several protruding spikes, and all parts except the shell are edible, with a flavor sometimes compared to both mussels and salmon.
The shellfish features prominently at the top of the national coat of arms and mussels are widely recognized as the national dish. Conch shells and shellfish symbols are everywhere: a giant statue of a conch shell greets tourists at Lynden Pindling International Airport in the capital, Nassau. Street markets sell dishes, spoons and works of art made from conch shells. Flags, t-shirts and hats with seashell motifs sell well among visitors. Conch shells are used as paperweights, bowls, musical instruments, and Christmas ornaments.
While conch can be expensive in the US and elsewhere, it’s so ubiquitous in the Bahamas that it’s not hard to find a filling conch meal for less than $10. That’s less than the price of many meats on the island, and mussels are also available for sale at home in most grocery stores. In rural parts of the Bahamas, nearly two-fifths of the population eat clams weekly, according to a 2021 study.
The country of about 400,000 people is home to 9,000 mussel fishers – a full 2% of the population, and numbers appear to be holding steady even as mussel numbers decline, according to a study in the journal Fisheries Management and Ecology. The flesh of the clams themselves is worth millions a year at the docks, and it’s also a major driver of tourism to the islands and a major export to the US and many other countries where clams are a delicacy.
Divers typically harvest clams by hand, preferably in shallow waters from a small boat and without equipment more sophisticated than a mask, snorkel, and fins. Sometimes divers operate in fairly deep waters of 20 or 30 feet and can take home as many as 1,000 shells in a single trip. Many fish for other species such as B. snappers, but initially identify themselves as clam fishers. And for many, fishing is both a family tradition and a ticket to bourgeois life on the island chain, where the cost of living is slightly higher than in the US
The mussels are often cracked open with a hammer on the beach shortly after harvest, the flesh quickly removed and the shells discarded. It’s common to see discarded clams piled eight feet up the coast, and some communities have dedicated clam dumps with mounds of empty clams towering into the sky. Some of the coastal middens are so solid that they are used as jetties or boat docks.
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Sherica Smith, 44, owns Shabo’s, a popular conch stand on Grand Bahama Island. She, too, recalls a time when “you could go out there and get clams.” She pointed to the ocean behind her booth, where people who fish for clams now have to go out to sea in boats to dive for shellfish.
According to numerous government agencies and conservation agencies, the queen mussel has been in sharp declines in some fishing grounds across the country. A 2011 survey in the Exuma Cays, a critical fisheries area, found that the density of adult mussels on the islands’ shelves had declined by nearly 91% over a 20-year period, according to documents from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United States nations. The depletion of the mussel was followed by years of nationwide fishing – fishermen who bagged about 1.7 million pounds of mussels in the 1970s had grown to more than 14 million pounds by 2006, the documents say. The loss of mussels increased in several fishing grounds across the country from the 1990s.
Even Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park, established in the 1950s as the first marine sanctuary in the Bahamas, is not immune to the loss of mussels, as fishing pressure outside of it limits the number of young mussels moving into the park for food – and agricultural organization found.
A 2022 report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration stated that the queen mussel “is showing a negative trend over time and the decline is largely due to overfishing.”
So bad is the overfishing of clams that one estimate shows clams could disappear commercially in less than half a generation, said Lester Gittens, senior official with the Bahamas Department of Marine Resources. A 2019 report by Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium said the king clam fishery could disappear as early as 2029 without reducing harvests.
Andrew Kough, a biologist at Shedd Aquarium who has studied mussels in Bahamas waters, said one challenge for shellfish is the lack of enforcement of existing laws restricting fishing by foreign vessels. Industrial fishing fleets from other nations have overexploited some of the areas where mussels grow, he said. Many Bahamian clam fishers say poaching comes from other nations that harvest clams but face tighter restrictions than Bahamian fishermen, such as B. the nearby nations of the Dominican Republic and Jamaica. Fueled by strict laws in their home countries or exhausted clams in their national waters, poachers are turning to illegal fishing in the Bahamas.
Poaching is particularly problematic on Cay Sal Bank, an underwater habitat between Cuba, Florida and the Bahamas, Kough said.
Poachers “act on the assumption that they won’t be caught,” Kough said. “Enforcement is extremely challenging out there.”
The Bahamas’ national association with shellfish is also a big part of what caused their decline, said Lindy Knowles, senior science officer at the Bahamas National Trust, a nonprofit organization that manages national parks. Tourist demand for shellfish has led to their depletion in many areas of the country, Knowles said.
The demand for mussels has made it difficult for the shellfish to reproduce fast enough to support the population, Knowles said.
The problem of overfishing is exacerbated by the warming climate, which has brought unpredictable weather that disrupts and damages mussel fishing grounds and habitats. The mussels gather in large groups to feed and breed on seagrass beds, some of which were severely damaged by storms such as Hurricane Maria in 2017. According to scientists, the herds in these areas have become thinner.
The increasing acidification of the warming ocean is also a threat to mussels, as it can cause their shells to decay. The problem is linked to climate change and is a growing concern for many species of shellfish.
And warming oceans have also affected mussel migration patterns. The shellfish slowly move to deeper water with a single foot in the winter and return to shallower waters to spawn in the summer. However, according to a 2022 study in the journal PLOS One, “rising water temperature due to climate change is likely to change the timing and length of the queen mussel breeding season.”
Conservationists and locals in the Bahamas have also said the worsening storms could be causing a mass die-off of clams and have caused them to be washed onto sandbars.
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In the Bahamas, conservationists want to learn from the mistakes made in the US, which taught the hard lesson that once clams are gone, it’s very difficult to bring them back.
Nearly 60 years ago, the once-thriving Florida mussel fishery fell victim to overfishing. Conch was once abundant off the Florida Keys, and Key West is still nicknamed the “Conch Republic.”
Mussel harvesting predates European settlement of Florida, as indigenous groups fished for shellfish thousands of years ago. It grew into a commercial enterprise and reached the point of unsustainability in the mid-20th century.
Commercial harvesting of mussels, which accelerated after World War II, was banned in Florida in 1975, and even recreational consumption of mussels ended a decade later. The state began trying to rehabilitate the mussel population with a research program in the mid-1980s, but it remains off-limits to all harvest workers.
The loss of Florida clams is one factor that has resulted in the US becoming the world’s largest importer of clam meat, and that in turn has put pressure on Bahamian fishermen to harvest more. Since the Florida ban, the Bahamian crop has grown from about 4 million pounds in the mid-1970s to over 8 million pounds by the mid-2010s.
Scientists are still hoping for the possibility of one day rebuilding Florida’s mussel population, but it remains in poor shape, according to reports from the National Marine Fisheries Service.
One reason Florida seashells are difficult to restore is because of the mollusc’s life cycle. Mussels take three to four years to reach reproductive age and they are very sensitive to water quality and sometimes fail to breed unless conditions are ideal.
Mussels also tend to depend on a strong local population in a given habitat, Kough said. Other marine species can sometimes replace a lost population with a new population moving in from elsewhere, but that has proven more difficult for Florida’s clam.
“Once they’re gone, they tend to stay away,” Kough said.
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In the Bahamas, the government has been considering new protections, such as B. Stricter minimum catch size rules to reduce fishing pressure and allow mussels to proliferate.
The government is also pursuing more aggressive enforcement of existing laws. And the Bahamas National Trust is working to equip fishermen with tools to help them physically measure clams to make sure they’re big enough for harvest.
The US is considering adding seashells to the Endangered Species Act, which could halt imports into the country, the world’s largest importer.
Reducing fisheries by half over the next three years, as a new proposal promises, is one way to potentially stave off shellfish loss, Knowles said.
Previous efforts to regulate mussel fisheries more tightly have often not been aggressive enough, Knowles said.
A new rule on the table is a change in how the lip of the conch shell is measured. Current rules state that the mussel must have a well-formed, flared lip to be considered an adult. That doesn’t necessarily mean the clam is mature, however, and a more effective law would provide more specific guidance on how thick the lip needs to be, conservationists said.
Another option touted by conservationists would be to reduce the amount of mussels exported, as international demand is a major driver of fishing pressure. Another proposal calls for a closed season for mussels. But many local fishermen strongly oppose this idea.
Kough of the Shedd Aquarium has been leading fieldwork in the Bahamas to try to develop new management strategies for the clam. Aquaculture has been tried over the years to reduce the need to harvest wild mussels, but it never paid off, he said.
That means protecting the marine areas where baby mussels grow is especially important, Kough said.
“It will depend a lot on how to properly manage the wild populations,” he said.
The potential loss of mussels would be a particularly devastating blow to rural parts of the country that depend on their protein intake, said Jewel Beneby, research officer for the Bahamas National Trust.
“It’s a source of protein in the Bahamian diet,” Beneby said. “People eat mussels all the time, they love it, it’s a delicacy, it’s part of our culture. But it’s also a source of protein.”
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Many clam fishers like Davis acknowledge that there are fewer clams than there used to be. But there is also a lot of resistance to the possibility of new restrictions on fishing. Even the possibility of a grace period draws trouble.
“I don’t want to see the conch get a season or get banned,” Davis said. “The government is putting more emphasis on coming down on us. But there is not that much focus on poachers.”
Smith, the owner of the clam stand and also a clam fisherman, said she thinks concerns about the disappearance of clams are overblown. Like many members of the fishery and many residents of the Bahamas, she believes fishermen simply need to put in more effort to keep up with demand.
“Conch will be here forever. Imagine the depths of the sea,” Smith said. “Every time the clam came back.”
Others in the Bahamas, like Davis’ father Leroy Glinton, 67, have tried to find new ways to make money from conch. Glinton, a longtime clam fisherman, has set up a clam art studio in his backyard, just steps from where his daughter goes out to sea to harvest the shellfish. It is located in McLean’s Town on Grand Bahama Island, not far from the ruins of an ancient church made from crushed conch shells that have fallen victim to time and storms.
Glinton hopes encouraging greater use of clam shells could help ease fishing pressure. If fishermen can get more money out of each individual shell by selling or using the shells, they may not need to harvest as many to make a living, he said.
He realizes that convincing others to take fewer shells might be difficult, but he also believes they might not have a choice.
“All Bahamas need to realize that making a quick buck doesn’t matter. Because when the material is gone, the money is gone,” Glinton said.
Conservationists like Knowles believe it is important that the Bahamian government succeed in its efforts to reduce shellfish overharvesting.
“There is no Bahamas without a shell,” Knowles said.