JAMES CITY COUNTY Up close and in person, blue catfish are gruesome creatures. They grow big and ugly and gray. They croak like pigs. And because they have no scales, they are especially slimy, even as fish go. They also are aggressive and gluttonous. Big ones that reach up to 80 pounds have been compared to underwater vacuums, sucking up whatever gets in the way of their pouty mouths - crabs, worms, other fish. They are not native to Virginia, but were brought here from the Midwest, from the Mississippi, Ohio and Missouri rivers. Wildlife managers in several Southern states started importing blue cats in the 1970s, stocking them in rivers and lakes as a way of creating lucrative sportfishing venues. It worked. Today, there are catfish clubs and catfish tournaments and catfish guides with Internet sites that advertise the thrill of hooking one of these powerful beasts, a monster, and reeling them in. The experiment has worked almost too well, especially in Virginia. The freshwater transplants have started taking over entire habitats, in places such as the James and Rappahannock rivers. They now are expanding into salty, tidal waters, as far east as Hampton Roads at the edge of the Chesapeake Bay. Also troubling is their food, which includes some of the same species that wildlife managers are trying to save and restore - the blue crab, American shad, American eel, river herring, menhaden. So what to do? No one is quite sure. Bob Greenlee, a veteran biologist from the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries with a deep voice and grizzled beard, has been studying catfish for years. He rejects complaints from watermen and others that blue cats are key reasons why crabs have declined so much in the Bay in recent years, and why efforts to revive shad and herring continue to fall flat. Still, Greenlee says the population boom - which has carried blue cats to every tidal tributary in the state, even spilling into neighboring North Carolina and Maryland - is "a real concern" that should be closely watched and better understood. "The densities are so high, you can't believe it," Greenlee said during a research trip last week on the James River. "There are a lot of big fish out there. When they come into an area, the numbers of competing fish - the white catfish, the channel catfish - just plummet." Alarmed by the trends, fishery managers across the Chesapeake Bay region have decided to work collectively to handle the deluge. Tom O'Connell, director of fisheries for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, said experts from his state, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and the Potomac River Fisheries Commission agreed this month to devise a coordinated strategy to manage blue cats - not to exterminate them, he insisted, but to "keep them from devastating our shared resources." "Right or wrong, blue catfish are here to stay," O'Connell said. "We just have to figure out how to contain them." Maryland, for example, makes it illegal to transport live blue cats to other waterways in the state, in hopes of curbing their spread. North Carolina maintains no limits, no seasons, no restrictions on catching the bulky species in coastal waters. "We're concerned," said Mike Loeffler, a biologist with the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries, based in Elizabeth City, "especially when you look at what's going on in the James River."
Storms threatened overhead on a recent morning as a team of six scientists and technicians from the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries prepared for a day of surveying blue cats on the lower James, just off the Chickahominy River, in James City County. The unshaven crew, wearing ball caps and coveralls, would be shocking waters at various locations in order to stun any blue cats swimming nearby. The shock waves affect only catfish, and the blue cats of varying sizes bubble to the surface in droves. The researchers scoop up the dazed, floundering fish with hand-held nets, toss them into tanks aboard three work boats, count them and measure them - all the while shouting out the results while an aide writes down the lengths. "26!... 31!... 44!... 29!" They also "sacrifice" a few fish by cutting into their heads and removing their ear bones with a pair of tweezers. Greenlee, the team leader, is an expert at this surgical procedure, which tells scientists how old the cats are. The oldest blue ever found on the James was 15 years old, Greenlee says. A beast weighing 92 pounds, recovered from Kerr Lake in Southside Virginia during sampling a few years ago, was 11 years old, he recalled. The largest blue cat ever caught in Virginia waters, at 102 pounds, 4 ounces, was recorded last summer in the lower James, snagged by an angler just south of Richmond. "They can get pretty big, pretty quickly," Greenlee said. "They hit a certain age and really take off." It's these big ones, about 1 percent of the blue cat population, that are renowned for gobbling up crabs and other fragile aquatic species. Worse, they also are tainted with toxic PCBs, a chemical byproduct linked to cancer, which can be passed on to people who eat them. The state Department of Health instructs the public not to eat any blue catfish that are longer than 32 inches and caught from the James River east of Interstate 95 - basically, anything south of Richmond. The health department also advises that seafood lovers eat no more than two meals a month of blue catfish less than 32 inches long and taken from this same swath of the James. The warning also applies to smaller blue cats caught east of I-95 on the Rappahannock River, and on the Dan River and the Roanoke River. Because blue catfish are top predators at the head of the food chain in Virginia rivers, PCBs tend to accumulate in their tissues, becoming more and more toxic along the way. Still, there is a growing seafood market for blue cats, especially the smaller, less-toxic ones. Some watermen want the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, which oversees saltwater species, to assume control of blue cats. Currently, the Game and Inland Fisheries department manages them. John Wyatt, president of the Independent Watermen's Association, who himself nets blue cats in the lower James, argues that the game department favors sportsmen over watermen. In a pinch, Wyatt argues, the game department might greatly restrict commercial harvesting. Currently, the department has just one rule regarding commercial blue cat fishing: watermen can keep just one fish per day over 32 inches. "We're at their mercy," Wyatt said. "They could pull the plug on us tomorrow, and we'd be out of business." Wyatt said blue catfish have "completely altered" the environmental dynamics of the James River - for the worse: "We've got a great recreational fishery, but it's cost us a lot; they've done a tremendous amount of damage." The game department conducts its painstaking population research each year, mostly bouncing between the James and Rappahannock rivers, trying to calculate how blue catfish stocks are growing, spreading, changing. On a humid morning earlier this month, team members had already been going hard for three straight days on the James, through rain and storms, surveying areas from Richmond to Newport News. The early results: further dominance and increasing presence - blue cat abundance has increased every year since 1988, according to the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. Researchers joked, kidded and needled each other for hours, as fish flew about the boats, water splashed and blood oozed. Robbie Willis, a young technician, was responsible for wrestling the big cats out of the tanks and onto a measuring scale. It was exhausting work, but Willis hung tough. His hands became chapped and raw from grabbing catfish by the body and mouth and doing battle all day. He spread duct tape over minor wounds on his palms, where blue cat spines had punctured the skin. "It's not too bad," Willis shrugged when asked about the pink abrasions. "It doesn't help much when meeting girls, though." At the last stop of the day, an incredible froth of blue cats came to the surface after an electro-shocking just outside Upper Chippokes Creek on the James. Big, small and medium-size cats were seemingly everywhere. "Look at the fish!" shouted Chad Boyce, a usually laid-back biologist driving one of the research boats. "Look at the biomass! Jeez! I don't think I've ever seen something like this before." Greenlee just smiled and steered his boat toward more froth ahead of him. "Wow," he said. The rain began to fall, but more work lay ahead. As they catalogued their findings, the silence of the river echoing their voices, the team began to talk about their favorite fish movies and where to eat that night. It had been a long day. Scott Harper, (757) 446-2340, scott.harper@pilotonline.com ================================================ Fishing reduces stress and gives you a break from our modern world where everything is going a million miles per hour 73 Check & Clear 6 LOC: 38-54-14.60N / 097-14-09.07W |
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