Kids help restore white seabass population, but report says state program is ineffective

At a Huntington Harbour dock Thursday afternoon, 11 Edison High students clustered around a cooler filled with baby white seabass. The fish’s population in the wild has dwindled over the past half century.

The kids used a scanner to check the tags embedded in the 8″ specimens, which they’d raised in a tank at their Huntington Beach school. They then lowered them one by one in the water and bid them adieu.

“Bye Brandon,” went one farewell.

But Brandon’s future could be a short one, according to survival studies of farmed white seabass released into the ocean.

While the educational aspect of the hatch-and-release program has been touted, it’s a small part of a broader effort to resurrect the California population of the popular dinner fish — an effort that has been largely ineffective, according to a state-commissioned study released earlier this year.

Volatile population

After sport fishermen routinely reeled in 50,000 white sea bass a year in the 1950s, the stock dropped drastically — a change largely attributed to overfishing.

By the 1980s, commercial sportfishing vessels — known as party boats — were reporting landing fewer than 1,000 a year.

That prompted state lawmakers to launch a program to study the decline and set up man-made hatcheries to replenish the stock.

There were also increased restrictions on the size and amount of fish that could be taken, and on the use of fine-mesh gill nets. Catches soared following the warm El Nino waters of the late 1990s, but have trailed off in recent years.

“Most likely the increases in landings have been due to oceanic change and regulatory changes rather than the hatcheries,” said Valerie Taylor, a marine biologist who oversees the program for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

This year’s study found that the hatchery program is responsible for less than 1 percent of the white seabass caught off the state’s coast.

Many recreational fishermen disputed that conclusion at a series of town hall meetings this summer and most said they still supported the program, according to Taylor. A $5.40 fishing license stamp, required for ocean sportfishing, covers most of the $1.3 million program cost.

Fishermen raised questions over the study’s data and modeling analysis while some scientists have suggested that fish released may have headed for warmer waters in Mexico.

In any event, only 1,952 white seabass were landed by party boats in 2016, according to Mike Shane of Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute. The independent non-profit, set up by the founders of SeaWorld marine park, has run the hatchery program since it was initiated 35 years ago.

In the wake of the study, the program finds itself at a crossroads. The state is in the process of determining whether it should continue and if so, in what form.

Low survival rates

The four-month old fish released by the students at Edison High and three other Orange County schools this week were hatched at the Hubbs-SeaWorld hatchery in Carlsbad, then raised in tanks at the four campuses.

The size potential of the fish, which is actually part of the croaker — not the bass — family,  is significant. The record for sportfishing in the state is a 93-pound specimen speared by a free diver in Malibu in 2007, according to the Department of Fish and Wildlife.

But white seabass released into the ocean from the hatchery are far less likely to reach full size than those born in the wild.

“If mortality rates of the released hatchery fish were reduced to those of wild seabass, then current stocking rates could result in a hatchery contribution of 18 percent instead of less than 1 percent of the total fishery catch,” reads the state-commissioned report, which was headed by California Sea Grant at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

The Hubbs-SeaWorld hatchery has been identifying variables that can increase the survival rates and is making adjustments, Shane said.

They’ve learned that mortality rates are highest for fish released in winter, he said. Additionally, fish that live in netted grow-out pens in bays and lagoons are more likely to survive once freed than those that go straight into the wild from tanks.

“They’re exposed to small fish coming through the nets, which they’ll eat, and they’ll see bigger fish,” Shane said, explaining how white seabass from hatcheries can learn their place in the food chain. “They’re getting exposed to their natural environment.”

Shane and his colleagues apply that knowledge to their work at the hatchery, which is recognized as a pioneer in its field.

“The (program) has made groundbreaking progress in developing hatchery rearing and enhancement practices and systems for marine species, and in related scientific discoveries,” the report says before reiterating that it has not “substantially increased the abundance of white seabass.”

Empowering kids

Like the broader white seabass program, the schools’ component is not just about increasing fish populations.

“These kids are the ones who are going to make the decisions to preserve the ocean habitat in the future,” said marine biologist Nancy Caruso, who started the white seabass offshoot in Orange County schools seven years ago.  Her program Get Inspired! Inc. has also worked with students to replenish Orange County kelp beds and has an ongoing project to restore abalone stocks.

“A bunch of scientists out there is nice but the community needs to be invested if these are going to be preserved,” she said.

Hubbs-SeaWorld began outreach to schools in 2010. Beside the five school programs in north coastal Orange County that Caruso coordinates, Hubbs-SeaWorld provides hatchlings to five schools in San Diego County and one, the Port of Los Angeles High School, in Los Angeles County, Caruso said.

Asked about releasing the small fish directly from the tank to the ocean just days before the beginning of winter — when the fish have the least chance of survival — Shane emphasized the educational aspect of the program. Giving kids direct, real-life exposure to aquaculture and ocean ecology is a primary goal of the school program, he said.

“It gives them an unprecedented opportunity to learn things you don’t typically find in a classroom,” he said. “They’re becoming stewards of the environment. These are the future scientists who are going to be involved with aquaculture.”

And the low survival rate of the fish they’re releasing?

“They’re not putting out that many fish,” he said, adding that the school year helps dictate release dates of late fall and late spring.

Of the 2,100 white seabass Hubbs-SeaWorld will put into the ocean this year, about 350 will go through school programs first. More than 2 million white seabass have been released since the state program began.

What’s next

California Sea Grant, the consultant firm that produced this year’s report, is compiling and analyzing the 195 comments — mostly from fishermen — received in the town hall sessions and subsequently by mail and email.

That analysis is expected to be released by February.

The Department of Fish and Game will then embark on a process to determine whether the program should be discontinued, continued or continued with a focus on a different popular sport fish such as the California halibut.

“Do we want to dial back the program and make it more research oriented? Or do we want to focus on (fish stock) enhancement?” Taylor said of the decisions ahead.

Regardless of the future, Hobbs-SeaWorld’s Shane indicated no reservations about the work he’s accomplished so far.

“It’s been a 30-plus year experiment and we’ve learned a lot about the fish and about aguaculture,” he said. “You never know the repercussions of letting creatures, like the white seabass, disappear. It’s our responsibility to keep them alive.”