Illegal commercial fishing to blame for dead mullet on Anna Maria Island beaches, officials say

ANNA MARIA ISLAND -- Beachgoers looking for a Christmas walk on Anna Maria Island a few weeks ago got an unpleasant surprise: thousands of dead, rotting fish littering the 9-mile coastline from top to bottom.

Some initially blamed red tide, but county officials said nearly all the fish were white roe mullet, which points to another culprit: commercial fishermen illegally throwing dead fish back into the Gulf.

"The fishermen who have been here for generations, who do this for a living don't do this. It's the people who are plumbers, landscapers and others who have other jobs and they come here and rape and pillage our waters during the season," said Capt. Kathe Fannon, who owns Captain Kathe and First Mate Puppup Charters and has been in her family's business of commercial fishing for years. "They throw cast nets at the mullet, then check each of them for either red roe or white roe, and they throw the white roe back."

Fannon said there's a huge difference in pricing for red roe, or female mullet, and white roe, the male mullet. Red roe mullet is used to ultimately make caviar and can be sold for around $1.75 per pound, Fannon said. White roe, which is used to make bait for other sea life, is not nearly as valuable.

"You'd be lucky to get a nickel for a pound of white roe mullet," Fannon said.

When fishermen throw cast nets around Anna Maria waters during mullet spawning seasons, they can get up to 800 pounds of mullet aboard a ship,

Fannon said. Then they have to check each individual fish for white roe or red roe by pinching the birth canal. By the time they get to most of the white roe, the fish are already dead. But due to the huge price difference, fishermen don't want to waste the boat space on the white roe.

Those fish instead wash up on the beach, where they become a stinking headache for county officials.

"Our employee, Mark Taylor, was called on a Friday at 2 p.m. when he was off work and then worked until 9 p.m. -- well after dark, with lights -- combing the beaches of the dead mullet," said Charlie Hunsicker, director of the Manatee County Parks and Natural Resources Department. "Then he got back out there at 5 a.m. on a Saturday, and by 1:30 p.m. he and other employees had picked it all up."

Taylor, the parks maintenance technician, then filled two 20-yard landfills in East Manatee with the thousands of rotting fish, which they found all the way from Longboat Pass up to Bean Point. About $4,000 was spent on county wages to pick up the mullet and for tipping fees at the landfill, which came out of tourist development funds, Hunsicker said.

This has started occurring every year during mullet spawning, Hunsicker said, and Fannon said it just keeps getting worse. After the 2011-2012 mullet season, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission issued an order clearly stating the practice was illegal.

"The take of mullet, and other fish, from the waters of this state, that is not being used, requires the immediate release and return of such fish ALIVE to the water," the order stated, the emphasis theirs.

But the practice has continued, and FWC officials said it's a difficult law to enforce.

"We have to catch them in the act of throwing the fish back," said Gary Morse, spokesman for the FWC. "There's a lot of people out there, and we have a small staff."

Hunsicker said by next year he's hoping to make it a priority for the FWC to have at least one boat out in the mullet spawning areas.

"Sometimes even I'll go 78 mph on the highway, but if I see a cruiser I'll immediately slow down," Hunsicker said. "All it takes is one boat being out there."

On the other side, Hunsicker said commercial fishermen who engage in the practice need to be more responsible, either by catching less mullet so they can sort through them quickly enough to throw the white roe back alive, or by just keeping the white roe mullet on board.

Fannon doesn't participate in the cast-netting personally, saying, "frankly, it makes me sick." But, he said, expecting fishermen to sort through the white roe quickly enough to keep them alive is unreasonable. She blames the dead mullet on the 1995 gill net ban, which banned nets that had meshes big enough that the white roe could swim through, but the red roe would be caught in.

"We've been doing this since 1895, and we perfected the gill net in a way that wouldn't deplete the source," Fannon said. "Now that those are outlawed, if you want mullet you have to use the cast nets, and that does deplete the source."

Morse disagreed, saying he had used gill nets personally and that white roe would still get caught in the gill nets.

Local fishermen are planning to have a meeting Sunday at the Cortez Fisherman's Hall to discuss the mullet issue.

Hunsicker said he worked with people on all sides of the gill net issue, but he thought the best way to deal with the issue would be for commercial fishermen to find the time to sort through the mullet while the fish are still alive.

"It really doesn't have to be this way. They're focusing on getting as much fish in the boat as they can. They could sort at that very moment, while they're still living, and throw them overboard," Hunsicker said. "And that is done by many fishermen who aren't out to get as much fish in as short a period of time as possible. They can and do sort them live. They could even have a third deckhand on their boat whose job it is to sort while they bring in the catch.

"There are options, and if there were a watchdog there, it makes economic sense to obey state law."

This story was originally published January 11, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Illegal commercial fishing to blame for dead mullet on Anna Maria Island beaches, officials say ."