I’m told that I’m not a lot of good when it comes to being diplomatic. So I apologise now for upsetting some people. That’s not the object of this piece but it is bound to happen because I can’t see any way around it. So here goes…
The best fisheries I know of are those with bailiffs and riverkeepers who protect the fisheries and banksides. The worst fisheries I know are those with no controls. Maybe you have a different experience but that’s mine.
If I look at fisheries I visit, I don’t see ‘nature’ as nature intended. I see a manufactured environment more resembling a garden than the chaos which is true nature. Our rivers and stillwater fisheries are nothing like what they would be had man never interfered. We dam and dredege and channelise and canalise our rivers, put in weirs and lock gates then stock them to the point where they are totally artificial, in much the same way that gardens are. The lakes and stillwaters? Well, many of them we created from scratch, farm ponds, estate lakes, sand and gravel pits, reservoirs etc. So our waters are really not Natural in any real sense. They are creations, like gardens.
There is an argument that the theory of evolution determines that there actually is no such thing as a balance of nature. Because how could creatures evolve in a balance? Unless perhaps that balance is a state arrived at only after aeons of evolution – and is so delicate that any interference will upset that balance and promote more evolution. Man has never been gentle in his interference.
There is definitely no ‘balance of nature’ in a garden. Gardeners don’t allow it. They spray and weed, protect and manage the crops and flowerbeds. Man manipulates nature to effect a result that humans, who are the ultimate apex predators, prefer. If we allow nature loose in a garden, the weeds and slugs soon take over. Similarly, if we allow nature to run our fisheries, the strong will eat the weak and…. that will be the end of it. No balance. We know this because we have already experienced it. Just look at our oceans if you want some fishy examples.
The reason there are no herring shoals left in the North Sea is because an apex predator was allowed to devour and kill as much of the stocks as it wanted to, unchecked. Look at the cod fishery on the Grand Banks. Wiped out by the same apex predator who proclaimed that the “balance of nature” would replenish the stocks and repair the damage.
But it didn’t. Nature didn’t balance. The cod never returned to the Grand Banks nor the herring to the North Sea. Nor the schools of 1000lb tunny which fed on those vast herring shoals. The port of Grimsby, once home to the largest commercial fishing fleet in the world, today has no commercial fishing operations. Scarborough, only eighty or ninety years ago the big-game fishing capital of Europe, could today be the British Ft Lauderdale, home of marinas full of big-game fishing boats. Instead it’s just, well, Scarborough. Another angling desert.
There are lessons here. In less than a hundred years an unchecked apex predator has stripped the planet of 90% of its fish stocks. Will nature balance this rape of the planet’s resources? Perhaps, given tens of thousands of years. But we don’t have that kind of time. In the shorter term, only careful farming, gardening and management of these resources can have any affect.
I’m not suggesting that we stop all commercial fishing in the ocean, or that we kill all the apex predators, that would be daft – but I do strongly believe we need to have very strict controls over their activities. This includes otters. Having no controls over predation in waters where stocks are fragile is simply throwing those stocks away and creating fish deserts, like the North Sea and the Grand Banks. To those who say there will never be controls for otters – well, there were once, and history does have a habit of repeating itself.
We are told there are now a couple of thousand otters out there. We call them apex predators, and protect them. And many conservation-minded anglers say ‘Quite right too’. Something inside me wants to agree with this viewpoint – after all, we all love to experience the heart-in-mouth thrill of seeing precious wildlife like this at the waters edge – but conservation is a double edged sword. Conserving a fishery means not allowing it to be ravaged by uncontrolled predation, from any source. If these 2000 apex predators were not otters, but, say, human predators from Eastern Europe – fishing 24 hour days, 365 days and nights a year, destroying every fish they caught, not just for food but also for practice or fun or some other reason we can’t begin to comprehend – I doubt we would display the same tolerance many today show for otter predations. Yes that’s emotive talk but I also think it’s pretty accurate.
If we are to talk about a balance, we cannot ignore discussing the checks required to bring about that balance. Because nature will not achieve anything like it without a big helping hand from man.
I have to emphasise, this piece is a personal opinion and almost certainly not shared by some FM members nor by its staff. Feel free to shoot me down in the forums if you have a different take on things. You never know, you might convert me!
Geoff Maynard
