David Moss | Fisheries Conservation & What Anglers Can Do | Tom Rowland Podcast Ep. 693

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 693 with David Moss, Fisheries Project Manager for The Nature Conservancy in Florida.

Meet David Moss and The Nature Conservancy's Work in Florida

Tom Rowland: David, what's going on? How are you?

David Moss: I'm doing well. How about yourself?

Tom Rowland: Doing great, doing great. Just got back from a trip. Went to Alaska this time, and I'm resting up and getting back into the swing of things, but it was a good trip.

Tom Rowland: I'm excited to talk to you. You're from The Nature Conservancy, which is a really good conservation organization. Can you give people who may not be familiar with The Nature Conservancy an overview of what it does?

David Moss: Absolutely. I'm with The Nature Conservancy, as stated. We're a global conservation organization. We're in sixty-plus countries throughout the world, and we're in nearly every state in the U.S. We're really focused on science-based conservation for the food, lands, and waters that everybody needs to survive. Myself, I'm the fisheries project manager down here in Florida, and I'm focused on fisheries issues in the Southeast, the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

Tom Rowland: Cool. So how long has The Nature Conservancy been doing the kind of work you're tasked with right now?

David Moss: We've been in fisheries for quite a few years globally. We're just now starting to get into what we call finfish fisheries down here in the Southeast, particularly in Florida. We've done quite a bit of oyster restoration work throughout the state, up in the Mosquito Lagoon area and on the West Coast, we actually just finished a big project up in Pensacola Bay. But this is really our first foray into finfish, or the fish that we like to go out and catch.

Tom Rowland: I was familiar with The Nature Conservancy's work in the Rocky Mountains, a lot of work with spring creeks and restoration. And I remember The Nature Conservancy also has Palmyra, or another island out there, a bonefish destination way out somewhere. Do you know where that is?

David Moss: I'm not exactly sure where Palmyra is, but we have numerous conservation areas. I'm based out of Boynton Beach, and just north of me there's an area called Blowing Rocks Preserve in Jupiter, a lot of people from Southeast Florida are familiar with that. We also just gifted the last remaining private island off of Key West to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Tom Rowland: What island was that?

David Moss: It's now called David Wolkowsky Key. It used to be called Ballast Key.

Tom Rowland: Ballast Key, how long had The Nature Conservancy had that?

David Moss: We had purchased it a few years ago through fundraising, quite a few funds from different grants and areas, always with the intention of turning it over as a conservation area to the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Tom Rowland: Interesting. I've actually been on that key, had lunch with David Wolkowsky himself out there once. He was a friend of one of my clients, and we went out and had lunch. It's an amazing, very cool island. So what will happen to it now? Will the house remain, or will it be taken down?

David Moss: The house remains. We've actually done quite a few repairs to it, and some repairs to the dock so people can still access it. I don't know the exact designation it's going to get, but it's labeled for conservation, so it's not going anywhere, it won't be sold to private developers. The house will be kept up for caretakers. There was a small lab there where some coral work was done, but not a ton of science happening. That's all going to remain and be kept up. I'm not a hundred percent sure what the conservation designation will end up being, but not developed is the important thing.

Tom Rowland: That's a really cool place. There are very few places where you have access to the tarpon migration like that, potentially on foot, the tarpon literally migrate right off the beach there, and on the right tide you could walk out and get shots at big tarpon. Hard place to fish because of the white sand, but pretty neat.

Tom Rowland: So now, with your role at The Nature Conservancy, you have a different agenda from what you're working on. What is that?

The Deck to Depth Program: Descending Devices and Barotrauma

David Moss: I'm charged with a project we call Deck to Depth. It's a descending device outreach project that focuses on the snapper grouper fishery. In the South Atlantic, according to the South Atlantic Council, there are roughly fifty-five different species of snapper and grouper. Some of the most popular ones people know are black grouper, gag grouper, red grouper, mutton snapper, and red snapper.

These are one of the only suites of species that suffer from something called barotrauma, which is fairly similar to the bends in a scuba diver. When you bring the fish up too quickly, the gases in its swim bladder expand. If you want to release that fish, because it's undersized, out of season, or you've already caught your fill, a lot of times we see that fish just float away on the surface.

A descending device will actually bring that fish back down to depth and recompress it, to the point where it almost literally pops back to life once it gets down past a couple of atmospheres, and you can see it swim away again. It really helps these fish survive. The unfortunate truth is there are still quite a few people who don't even know these devices exist. There's actually a requirement in the South Atlantic, if you're in federal waters, more than three miles out, you're supposed to have one rigged and ready on your vessel if you're fishing for snapper or grouper. Unfortunately, most people don't even know that's a requirement.

Getting the Word Out: A Confusing Patchwork of Rules

Tom Rowland: Why do you think that is? Is it the job of the FWC, or is it something you all have to figure out? Part of the problem is people don't even know they're supposed to have this. Is that part of the outreach? When a new rule comes in, whether it was circle hooks at one point, or anything else, how is the best way to get anglers' attention and help them understand the rules and regulations? There are so many. Even people who make their living out there sometimes don't know exactly where they are relative to a boundary, so they just don't keep a fish because they're not sure. In your opinion, what's the best way to get anglers' attention and help everybody understand the proper regulations?

David Moss: Sure. We actually just completed a survey asking a very similar question. What we found is that outlets like this, podcasts with respected anglers, respected people in the fishing community, are where everybody goes to get their fishing information. I tell the story all the time: I remember waking up early on Saturday mornings as a kid, and when most kids wanted to watch cartoons, I was watching Bill Dance and Orlando Wilson. That's how I first learned to Texas-rig a worm, probably when I was way too young to be watching those shows. That's where anglers go to get information, it used to be magazines, and now magazines have given way to podcasts, TV shows, and YouTube. That's really our best outlet for outreach, which is why we're doing this, and we're thankful to people like you who help us with it.

Tom Rowland: Of course, but it's not just helping you, it's helping anglers too. If you're supposed to have this device and you don't know it, and you get checked and it's the first time you've ever heard of it, that's not doing the angler any favors either. That's a bad day, and you're probably not going to want to keep fishing, or it's not growing the sport. I think for the FWC, or whatever agency makes a new rule, it's really important to get the word out. In some cases, like when they said you couldn't bring a Goliath grouper or a tarpon onto the boat anymore, there was a pretty significant campaign around it, and I feel like people knew what was going on. But not every rule gets that kind of campaign. Maybe the descending device requirement does or doesn't, I didn't know it was actually a requirement. I thought it was ethically a good thing to have, but I didn't know it was required.

David Moss: Yeah, and this is where it gets really confusing. Beyond three miles is where FWC jurisdiction stops, at least on the Atlantic side. On the Gulf side, it's out to nine miles, and that's where the federal fishery management councils pick up, the South Atlantic Council on the Atlantic side, and the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council on the Gulf side. A lot of times regulations are in concert with one another, similar sizes, restrictions, and limits, but sometimes they're not, and this is one of those times.

Part of the reason is that in most of the state, if you're inside three miles, a descending device isn't going to do you much good because you're not really fishing deep enough for barotrauma to be a serious issue, except in that little South Florida window. So it becomes more of a federal issue. The councils have done a decent amount of outreach, but their reach is very limited. A lot of people still don't even know there's a jurisdictional separation, once you go beyond three miles, everybody assumes it's FWC the whole way, and for years I was one of them. The South Atlantic Council covers all federal waters from North Carolina down into Key West, so they've got a huge area to cover with a fairly limited reach, and it's kind of sad to say, but there aren't that many people willing to listen to what management agencies have to say. All too often they're just viewed as the bad guys telling us what we can't keep.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, but you also don't like getting a ticket, or worse, having your fishing license taken.

David Moss: Absolutely. And beyond it being a requirement, think about the help it can do for the fishery if people are using these things regularly. The number one reason we have a shortened red snapper season, almost no red snapper season, in the South Atlantic is dead discards. We're catching so many fish out of season and releasing them improperly, or they're just not surviving, that it burns through our allotment. Just using easy numbers for illustration: if the fishery can sustainably give up, say, a thousand fish a year, we're basically burning through that quota just by releasing fish improperly, they float away on the surface, or get eaten by a shark before they can get back down, which means we don't end up with a season at all.

Why Red Snapper Season Is So Short: The Discard Mortality Problem

Tom Rowland: So how do they come up with those discard numbers? I don't know how an agency, FWC or any other, could get an accurate count of how many fish are released and don't make it.

David Moss: That's the fifty-thousand-dollar question. Each species has, I'll call it, a susceptibility index to release mortality, some are more susceptible than others. Red snapper tend to have one of the higher release mortality rates; last I checked it was around twenty-five percent. So for every ten fish you catch and release, two and a half aren't going to make it.

Tom Rowland: Even with a device?

David Moss: No, that's with no device at all. And the agencies don't really have a good handle on how many people are using descending devices, the unfortunate truth is it's just not enough.

Tom Rowland: How would they even know that, from asking people, or from tackle shop sales, or what? That all seems like it would have to be some kind of guess.

David Moss: It's mostly from dockside interviews and a mail-out survey. They used to do phone surveys, but nobody answers a number they don't recognize anymore. That's how they estimate how many people went fishing, what they released, whether they used a descending device, and so on. As you can imagine, it's not the most accurate thing in the world. But according to the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which governs how we manage fisheries in this country, you have to use the best science and data available. If that's all we have, that's what we have, even if what you and I see out on the water tells a different story.

Tom Rowland: I really don't know whether that would lead to an overestimate or an underestimate of how many red snapper are being caught and released. If you come up to the dock and they ask how many you kept, and the bite was crazy, someone might say they caught a hundred when it was probably eleven, but it felt like a hundred, especially if you're not used to catching twenty-five red snapper in a day. That would be a big overestimate. But on the other hand, if somebody doesn't want to tell the warden what they caught, they might just say none, that would be an underestimate. I'd think in the science they probably average that out, which doesn't seem like great data, but it boils down to what someone thinks is going on.

David Moss: It's not the best, but it's the best we have. And I'm sure you can attest, one of the problems is that when you're on a really hot bottom bite, whether it's red snapper or, down in our neck of the woods, mutton snapper or mangroves, you just want to get another bait to the bottom. You're not thinking about how many you've caught or released. Then you get back to the dock, and even if you're trying to be a hundred percent honest, you're scratching your head, maybe I caught ten, maybe fifteen, I don't know.

Tom Rowland: And in other places, I haven't seen this in Florida, but I know it happens in Louisiana, around the shallower rigs, red snapper are swarming on the surface, and you can catch and release them in five feet of water with no problem at all. So I wonder how often that's part of the mix. It seems like a lot of the red snapper we catch here, we're actually trying to catch mutton snapper and end up with red snapper instead.

So for The Nature Conservancy getting involved in this, and correct me if I'm wrong, part of the goal is that if we can release more fish properly, maybe we could have a longer red snapper season. Is that the idea, or where does The Nature Conservancy fit into this?

David Moss: Yeah, we use red snapper as the example because it's always the hot-button issue, but it's really about any bottom fish. It really boils down to that. It sounds great for me to say I'd love for there to be fish for future generations, that's absolutely true, but at the end of the day, I want fish for myself too. I love to fish. I want to be able to go out and keep red snapper and not just have two days a year to do it.

We're seeing some issues with red grouper as well, and there was a stretch where people thought we were having a mutton snapper problem too, though that seems to have improved. But if we're doing the right thing according to the law, and most fishermen are conservationists at heart, we want to be able to go out tomorrow and catch a fish, and a week from now catch a fish, and so on. So why not do everything we can to help these fish survive? The red snapper mortality rate is around twenty-five percent, if we could even cut that in half, then instead of losing two and a half out of every ten fish caught, we'd only lose one, and we'd be keeping that other one and a half alive. Not only is that fish alive to catch another day, but the idea is that fish is a breeder that can produce a million more eggs, creating more snapper and more snapper. It snowballs from there.

Snapper and grouper are really the only suite of species consistently going through either overfishing or being overfished, meaning either you're taking more fish out of the stock than it can sustain, or the stock is below an optimal level. And again, one of the main reasons is dead discards, in both the Gulf and the Atlantic. You don't see that in almost any other fishery.

Best Release Practices: Ethics, Sharks, and Knowing When to Move

Tom Rowland: We'll talk about exactly how the descending device works for people who don't understand it. But another thing I think is important is just the ethical responsibility of anglers. Say you're trying to catch mutton snapper, and you catch a red snapper that doesn't release well, and you catch another one that doesn't release well either, and meanwhile you haven't caught a single mutton snapper, you drop down again and here comes another red snapper. There's a point where, historically, a spot has been a great mutton snapper spot, but on that day the more aggressive red snapper have moved in and taken over, and the more timid mutton snapper aren't showing. I think there's an ethical responsibility for anglers who care about fish stocks and conservation to simply move, even though it's frustrating for the captain, because this spot produced last week and now you're overrun with red snapper.

It's the same idea as when you're overrun with sharks. You bring up a fish, and it comes up whole. Then you bring up a half a fish. Then another half a fish. It's not that the fish aren't biting, you're on an amazing bite, it's that the sharks are eating them every time they come up. At some point, and that point needs to come faster and faster, you have to admit you're not going to get another fish to the boat. It's one thing if you've got world-class anglers who can crank a fish in fast and have a real shot at beating the sharks, but if you've got someone who's never caught a fish and is fighting the drag the whole way up, it's getting sharked every single time. At that point, it's time to move. I think that's a big message too, does The Nature Conservancy have a stance on that?

David Moss: Absolutely. The overarching goal of our Deck to Depth program is really best release practices, best fishing practices. We're working closely with the South Atlantic Council and with FWC, and we're all trying to deliver a similar message. The descending device is one huge piece of it, but there are other things you can do too. If you get a nice trophy red snapper, or even a trophy mutton snapper, and you've already got your limit, hold it up, take a quick picture, and get it back in the water as fast as possible. Don't leave it flopping around on the deck. And if you're getting sharked on every fish, go find another spot. A friend of mine, a captain named Don McKees, said it a long time ago: the fish don't see borders. There are no fences out in the ocean. He's absolutely right. If a spot is producing today, it may not produce tomorrow, the fish tend to move, and they'll find a different area to feed.

Tom Rowland: That's a big one, because some of this is outside of your control, but how long you sit there feeding the sharks is entirely within your control. When spot A, B, C, and every other spot is taken and you finally find a place where your people are catching a couple of fish, I get it, they're paying you a lot of money, you want to sit there. But when they're constantly getting eaten by sharks, it's time to go, no matter how crowded it is out there. That one is definitely on the angler, the guide, whoever's out there, recreational or commercial, if you're getting sharked, you've got to go.

How Descending Devices Work: Styles, Cost, and What Sharks Think of Them

Tom Rowland: Let's talk about the descending device itself, how it works, who came up with it, and what the history is behind it for people who don't understand how it works. How long has it been an idea, and when did it materialize into a real product?

David Moss: Sure. They've been around for quite a few years. It really started as part of the rockfish fishery out on the West Coast, California, Oregon, that whole area, and it really turned the fishery around by getting a lot of people to use them. There are numerous different styles, and we're agnostic as far as brand. There are commercially available ones you can buy at Bass Pro Shops or online.

The most popular style is the SeaQualizer. It's actually a pressure release, looks just like a Boga Grip, which all of us fishermen use to handle fish. You can set it to different depths depending on how deep you're fishing; the standard model is set for fifty, a hundred, or a hundred fifty feet. It's got a long line clip you can attach to either the rod you're fishing or, ideally, a second rod. You put a couple pounds of sash weight on it, just like deep-dropping, clip the grip right onto the fish's jaw, just like a Boga Grip, and drop it down. Once it reaches the depth you set, it pops right open.

We've got video on our website of a red grouper caught in a hundred and eighty feet that shows all the symptoms of barotrauma, mouth flared open because the stomach is pushing out, gills flared, eyes bugging out, stomach swollen. They drop it down on a SeaQualizer, and as it descends you can actually watch the eyes go back into its head, the mouth shrink back down, the stomach shrink back down. By around a hundred feet you can see the fish start to kick again, and by the time it reaches bottom and releases, you can see it swim away perfectly healthy.

There's also what they call a safety-pin style, it looks almost like an upside-down hook or a safety pin you stick through the fish's jaw with a heavy weight attached, and it drags the fish down. It has no barb, so when it reaches the bottom, it just pulls right off, you can even put it through the same hole the hook made. I know some party-boat crews in the Gulf, catching vermilion snapper a few at a time, will take a milk crate, attach some weights, turn it upside down, put five or six fish inside, throw it in the water, and it pushes all the fish straight to the bottom. Then they pull the crate back up on a rope, and the fish live to swim another day.

Again, we're pretty agnostic on brand or style, we just want everybody using something.

Tom Rowland: I want to watch that grouper video, that sounds great. One thing I was going to ask, when a red snapper comes up and its scales all blow out, it looks like that fish isn't going to make it no matter what. Is there video showing otherwise? Do you have to be careful how quickly you bring them back down, the way a scuba diver has to be careful not to come up too fast?

David Moss: It's the opposite, actually, you want to get it down as quickly as possible. That's why we call it Deck to Depth: get it from the deck of the boat back down to depth as fast as you can. Take your quick photo, everybody wants a nice picture of that big sow red snapper, then get it back down as quickly as possible, and the descending device just drags it down fast. It's really impressive to watch. A colleague of mine actually released a tagged snowy grouper in four hundred and some feet that lived to be tracked again, the tag was recaptured, but the fish had lived for something like fourteen days after release before the tag finally popped off, still alive.

And one of the other interesting things about descending devices, we were just talking about sharks, for whatever reason, sharks don't like them. I know that's always a worry, dragging a fish down through the water column. These devices run anywhere from about fifteen or twenty dollars up to sixty dollars for the more expensive ones, so it can be an expensive piece of equipment, but sharks ignore them. There's video of a mutton snapper going right past a bull shark and a sandbar shark, shooting straight by, and they completely ignore it. The same colleague just did a study off North Carolina where they released almost three hundred tagged fish on descending devices, and there wasn't a single instance of shark predation.

Tom Rowland: Do they have a diver in the water, or cameras, to watch what happens?

David Moss: All the fish in that study were tagged, and they also deployed a camera down there, attached right to the descending device itself during release.

Tom Rowland: That's a big improvement, there are so many different cameras now that can attach to the line or right in front of the lure. I'd imagine they have good video of all of that, and that's compelling when you can actually see it happening. We took one of our shows out to Texas, and they did a segment with a descending device, it was a SeaQualizer, and they used it a lot because they were catching so many red snapper. It was set for fifty, a hundred, and a hundred fifty feet, just like you said, and they were releasing their fish that way. There'll be some TV on that coming out soon, but it seemed really easy to use, and people have been using them for a while, I remember hearing about folks using them a long time ago around Key West, back when it was just considered a good way to release a fish. Now it's different because it's actually required.

Is a Descending Device Actually Required, and Who Enforces It

David Moss: Right. So they can't require its use, mainly because of enforcement, how would you even enforce that? But it is required that you have a descending device onboard if you're fishing for snapper or grouper in the South Atlantic and the Gulf.

Tom Rowland: What if the descending device was one of those milk crates, is that legal?

David Moss: Completely legal. You can make your own homemade version.

Tom Rowland: So there's really no excuse. What if somebody just had a weight with a safety pin on it and a hundred feet of rope?

David Moss: I actually have one that's not unlike that, a gentleman over in Cape Coral makes them. It's a little heavier duty than a safety pin, but not by much, he molds about a pound and a half of lead onto it, and it's perfectly legal and effective.

Tom Rowland: Everybody knows what an FWC boat looks like when it approaches. What kind of boat would be checking on one of these devices?

David Moss: Beyond three miles, it would be the Coast Guard. And at the dock, FWC, most officers know about the requirement even though it's technically not a Florida state rule, it's a federal one. They could check at the dock, ask where you were fishing, and whether you had a device onboard.

Tom Rowland: I think that's a fantastic thing, I don't see how it could hurt. I do think people would be far more open to using one of these devices if they thought it would translate into a longer season. I wonder how they'd measure that, if we've checked this many people, and this many had a device, and sales of these things are going up, does that eventually translate into an extra day of red snapper season? Do you have any forecast on that, or is that a hard question because you're not inside the agency making the call?

How Long Until Better Release Practices Translate Into Longer Seasons

David Moss: It's a tough question to answer accurately. I'd love to say that within the next year or two, if the outreach is adequate and we really change the mindset of what's going on out on the water, we're using red snapper as the example because it has such a short season, and about ninety percent of the reason it's so short is dead discards, discard mortality. If we can reverse that trend, and instead of killing something like a thousand fish just by releasing them improperly, we're only losing a couple hundred, that changes the stock status. The more breeders you have in the population, the better that bodes for the stock overall. Unfortunately, red snapper are pretty slow-growing, so it takes a while to go from zero to fifty compared to some other species. But ask anybody, there are plenty of fish out there. In some ways it's almost a dog chasing its tail: we're catching so many fish and releasing them in a way that hurts the stock, precisely because there are so many fish around. We're going in circles until we can reverse the effects of discard mortality, and this is one of the biggest ways to do it.

Tom Rowland: I think it's a good start. It's frustrating, especially with red snapper, for people who don't fish offshore much, red snapper is a fish that's highly regulated, but you go out there and you can catch a ton of them. So it looks like, why can't we keep these? Meanwhile you can keep mutton snapper all day, all year long, but you can't get away from these other fish. And they live deep, so it's hard to get an accurate count of how many are actually out there, but it sure seems like there are a lot. Go to a neighboring state, like Texas, and there are a lot of them there too. It's frustrating for the angler, because this is the biggest fish they've ever caught in their life, and they're being told they can't keep it, unless they happen to come on exactly the right day.

David Moss: I remember taking my wife fishing up in Saint Augustine, we were doing some inshore fishing, caught a couple of redfish, had a pretty nice day, and then she caught this one huge bull red and fought it for about twenty minutes. She was so excited, brought it to the boat, and our captain said, let's get her back in the water. She just looked at him and said, wait, what? I have to release that? You're kidding me. But yeah, that's what we have to do to sustain the population.

From Landscaper to Fisheries Advocate: David's Path Into Conservation

Tom Rowland: I'm interested, a little off the topic of descending devices, what's your path to this job? Obviously you're a passionate angler, you know a lot about fishing, what's the path to having a job like this?

David Moss: I took a bit of an untraditional path. As you said, I'm an angler first and foremost. I was born in Port St. Lucie, and I've been fishing there since before I could walk. My mom tells the story of going to the beach on Hutchinson Island, and I'd get washed up on shore by the waves, crawl back in, get washed up again, she couldn't keep me out of the water. I used to run a landscaping company before this, believe it or not, and did that for quite a few years, but I wanted to get more involved in the fishery. I saw things out on the water that I didn't like as an angler, and I wanted to get involved. So I started going to council meetings, applied for a seat on the Snapper Grouper Advisory Panel with the South Atlantic Council, and got on as the recreational representative for Florida, I'm going on my sixth year with that panel now. Through that, I was able to land this job with The Nature Conservancy, where, on the days I'm not fishing, I get to talk to people like you about fishing. It could be a lot worse, if there's one subject I love to talk about, this is it.

Tom Rowland: So when you go from being a recreational angler to attending these meetings and actually being a participant, what kind of things do you learn? A lot of anglers look at an issue and think there's something wrong, and all we've got to do is this one thing to fix it. Then you actually get involved in the process, like you did, and go to these meetings, what have you learned there that surprised you, that most anglers don't understand?

What Recreational Anglers Get Wrong About Commercial Fishing

David Moss: Like a lot of recreational anglers, I was convinced our problems all came from the commercial side, that if we could just do something about commercial fishing, us recreational guys would be fine, there's plenty of fish out there. It's not true, I guess is the easiest way to put it. Commercial fishing is very highly regulated. They have strict limits, and commercial fishermen have to report everything they catch and release, they have to reconcile what they catch with the fish house they sell it to. A lot of times, the total allotment of a given stock, mahi, for instance, commercial fishermen only get about ten percent of the total allowance, and recreational fishermen get ninety percent. It's not that lopsided in every fishery, but that's an example.

One of the things I like to point out to recreational fishermen, and this is something I knew but didn't really appreciate until I got involved, is, when was the last time you reported what you caught? You're not obligated to, but you go fishing all the time. When was the last time FWC actually asked you?

Tom Rowland: Honestly, the last time someone asked me was at the boat ramp, the people who are always down there. How was your day? How many did you catch? I always participate in those, but you don't go out of your way to report anything unless you're required to. There were times we had to file catch records for Everglades National Park, and you had to submit everything, but if you're not required to, it's zero. You're already busy, it takes twelve hours a day to be a fishing guide, you're not going to spend another thirty minutes on an unnecessary catch record. I don't think anybody's doing that unless it's something really unusual.

David Moss: Right, and usually that's FWC just checking to make sure you're within limits, they're not necessarily documenting what you caught.

Tom Rowland: There's that, with an actual officer. But then there are the volunteers with a clipboard, they don't look like an FWC officer, they're not carrying a gun, they don't have a badge, but they might have an FWC t-shirt on, and they're just conducting a survey.

David Moss: Exactly. I've been fishing out here longer than I care to mention, and I've only been stopped twice, ever. Once was on a paddleboard going for lobster off Fort Lauderdale, FWC came up and asked what I had, and I had one lobster in the cooler; it was a nice interaction. The other time was just before putting my boat in the water up in Fort Pierce, a routine safety check. I've never once reported anything officially. In the state of Florida alone, there are roughly four million licensed saltwater anglers, not everybody's out every day, but most of us aren't reporting what we catch. So it's really tough, when people ask how agencies know about red snapper numbers, because we're not even a hundred percent sure how many people are out there fishing on a given day.

Self-Reporting, Data Gaps, and Why Getting Involved Matters

Tom Rowland: Right, that's a tough one. I wouldn't even know who to report to if I wanted to.

David Moss: There are actually apps for that, believe it or not, iAngler is one, and there was another called MyFishCount that works almost like a trip log. It doesn't necessarily go anywhere official, but MyFishCount was sponsored by the South Atlantic Council for a while, and they actually used that data a few years back when they first reopened red snapper season and the weather blew everyone out for most of a scheduled November season. They used data from MyFishCount and similar apps, where people had registered a planned trip they ultimately couldn't take, to justify opening the season for a couple of extra days. So those apps exist, but because it's voluntary and not many people use them, it's not the most reliable data from a fishery-management standpoint.

Tom Rowland: So what else did you learn about the process of making or changing a fishery law once you got onto one of these councils?

David Moss: It's not just a flick of the wrist, like most people think. There's a lot of science and data that goes into it, economic impacts on the people involved, not just commercial fishermen but recreational anglers too. When you're going to shut down a fishery, that impacts a lot of lives, and you have to think about what else can be done. Before I got involved, I wasn't paying attention to much of that, I just knew when things would shut down, like Snook closing at the end of every year and again in the summer. I lived with it, but I didn't understand the process behind new rules, just that they were happening.

There's a lot that goes into it. Some of the issues they dealt with inshore on the West Coast, with red tides and algal blooms, if you're not paying attention, you just hear you can't keep anything inshore anymore and you get angry, without understanding the fish kills, the freezes, and the blooms that led to it. And that starts to affect things offshore too, because these inshore areas are nursery habitat for the forage fish, pilchards, menhaden, that eventually make their way offshore to feed snapper and grouper. A lot of snapper and grouper, like mutton snapper and mangrove snapper, actually use these inshore areas as nursery habitat themselves. So an algal bloom or red tide event inshore isn't going to affect the offshore population right away, but five years down the road you'll see big swings in year classes of fish, and managing all of that is genuinely complex.

Tom Rowland: Now that you've been on both sides of this, do you have advice for recreational anglers and fishing guides on how to be most helpful, beyond using descending devices and spreading the word?

David Moss: Peer pressure is where it's at, good and bad. If you're out fishing with a group of guys, be as respectful as you can to the fish, don't leave it flopping on the deck, take your quick picture, get it back in the water, and make sure your friends are doing the same. I remember, and you probably do too, walking the docks in Fort Lauderdale as a kid and seeing sailfish and sharks hung up on the boards, if you didn't bring one home to hang up, it was like you hadn't caught one. Now, if you bring home a sailfish, everybody yells at you, even though it's technically still legal to keep in some circumstances, nobody does it anymore, and a lot of that is peer pressure. Look at the sailfish fishery we have now because of it. I'm not saying mutton snapper needs to become a catch-and-release-only fishery, I love eating them as much as anybody, same with red snapper, but if we lean on our fellow anglers out on the water, that's the biggest thing that changes mindsets throughout a fishery. You can even go back to largemouth bass and Ray Scott starting B.A.S.S. and catch-and-release fishing, I remember the old metal stringers with twenty largemouth hanging off them, and now that's almost never done. You still catch big eight-pounders in Lake Okeechobee, but you release them right away. That's just peer pressure, anglers being good stewards with other anglers.

Learning More About The Nature Conservancy's Fisheries Work

Tom Rowland: What about The Nature Conservancy itself, if people wanted to learn more, or support it, or even just look at it skeptically and learn what it actually does, how would they go about that?

David Moss: Our website is nature.org, and our fisheries page specifically, where you can see that red grouper video I mentioned, is nature.org/floridafisheries. That's where we talk in depth about this program, our involvement in Florida fisheries, and the descending device work we're doing.

Tom Rowland: Looking ahead, assuming this campaign is successful, what's next for The Nature Conservancy? Are there other things you're currently looking at or would like to get involved in?

David Moss: Yeah, one of the things we mentioned earlier, the gaps in data, it's really difficult to know who's out there fishing and how many fish are actually out there. It's really complex math that scientists and statisticians use to estimate stock abundance. If we can do things as anglers to help with that, we're pushing forward on what we call data modernization, trying to move some of these data gaps to the next level, so we get a better, more real-time look at what's happening on the water. Oftentimes, with these surveys, it can take a year, two years, three years to get accurate data. It's kind of like the analogy I've heard from a couple people, imagine driving while only looking in your rearview mirror, or having blinders on your windshield and only looking at the mirror. We're trying to take some of those blinders off and look forward at what the fishery is doing, not just where it's been.

Data, Distrust, and the Case for Reporting What You Catch

Tom Rowland: It's an interesting place to be, because I'd think a lot of anglers would say, I'm not giving up any data, if we give it to them, they'll just use it against us. But on the other hand, if you have zero data, the agency only has whatever data it does have to make decisions with.

David Moss: You're absolutely right, and I won't pretend there won't be growing pains. It could go either way, it could turn out there's way more fish out there than we ever thought, or it could turn out there are more anglers using the resource than we ever realized. I try to look at the glass half full, because I'm an angler myself, and I'm not going to claim I'm the most responsible angler every single time I'm on the water, I've let the odd fish flop on the deck too. But for the most part we all try to do right by the resource because we want to keep using it. The more we can do that, and the more information we give the management agencies, the better the decisions get. You can listen to council meetings online, see what data they're working with, and if we're not giving them any data, that's all they have to go on, and it's not going to be the best. Long term, we really need to work on that.

Tom Rowland: It's an interesting place. I think a big thing I encourage people to do, if they're really interested but don't know what to do, is get involved like you did, go to these meetings, listen to them, attend, get involved at whatever level your schedule allows. Being involved is certainly better than not being involved, in my opinion. Then you actually understand what's going on and why decisions are being made, and maybe even have a voice.

David Moss: Absolutely. Virtually every council meeting has an opportunity for public comment, and believe it or not, that has changed policy when enough people speak up about what's happening in their local waters.

The Goliath Grouper Season and the Power of Public Comment

Tom Rowland: We saw that, I think, for the first time with Goliath grouper opening up, even on a restricted season and by permit. I thought it was a pretty good thing that it opened at any level, because it seems so easy to just shut something down, close it, and forget about it. But the fact that they kept looking back into it, despite cold fronts, red tide, everything else, and kept watching the science enough to eventually say, we think we can sustain a season now, would that have happened without public outcry, without people constantly asking, there are so many groupers out here, when are we going to have a season? I'm sure that had something to do with the decision to keep looking into it. That's one example of something opening back up. There are plenty of examples of things closing and never reopening, a place you used to be able to fish, a method you used to be able to use, where anglers were told, we'll study this for five years, and it's been closed for twenty. It just seems like it got closed and forgotten. Maybe they are looking at the data and just not telling anyone, I don't know. But the Goliath grouper situation, I think, is a real ray of hope that not every closure just gets forgotten. If it's closed, there's probably a reason. But public outcry, public opinion, voicing your concern, whatever you want to call it, your voice does matter as an angler. If you get involved, you can have a voice and probably make a difference in how a decision goes.

David Moss: No, absolutely. And the Goliath situation actually speaks to what you were just saying about having no data. Because it was closed for so long, there really wasn't much fisheries-dependent data, not much reporting from anglers, because nobody was keeping them. You'd have a few people targeting the real monsters, but for the most part it was treated as a nuisance fish, so there wasn't much data on it. That made it really difficult to make an informed scientific decision, because the data we had just wasn't there. So one of the things we actually advocated for with the opening was: let's at least get some good science out of this, really see what the population is doing, and make decisions based on that going forward.

Tom Rowland: Right, that's cool. Well, I think descending devices, in my opinion, are definitely worthy of everyone's use. That's my personal opinion, because there's nothing like watching one of those fish just float off, that's just not good. So anyway, you can learn more about it at nature.org/floridafisheries. And if you don't know what a descending device is, definitely go learn about it before you head offshore. Thanks, David, for coming on and explaining all of this. I wish you all the best with this new position and this campaign, and let us know how we can help.

David Moss: Absolutely, thank you very much, I appreciate the opportunity.

Tom Rowland: All right, thanks. We'll see you next week.

David Moss: See you.