As you may remember, our time in the northern Sea of Cortez was spent mostly yelling to each other “Holy crap, look at all those fish” or “Holy crap, did you see the size of that fish.” It was the aquarium that Coustaeu remembered. As we’ve made our way south (currently in Bahia Concepcion) we’ve seen progressively fewer fish. This includes schools of baitfish in the shallows and in the depths, and also reef fish and oscar fish during snorkel monitoring sessions.
A few folks have said that they’ve seen drastic reductions just in the past few years and they’ve blamed it on the net fishing and shrimp trawlers. However, we also know that these are the easy targets for uneducated guesses.
Does anybody have any information on trends in the sea that might explain this geographical difference?
Ed. note: our uneducated guess is that netting and shrimp trawling are devastating practices that are probably causing the decline in fisheries in the sea, but there appeared to be just as much netting and trawling in the north…
I’m not a real climatologist but I hang out with some of them. Here’s what I suspect.
1. El Niño. 2012 was only a weak ENSO year but the effect would still be to reduce numbers and diversity of the popular fish in the southern Gulf of California.
2. Summer vs. winter. Strong upwelling along Pacific Coast in summer increases productivity & biodiversity. That affects the southern Gulf more than the northern.
3. If it was primarily climate change, it should more quickly affect the northern Gulf which acts more like a closed basin, vs. the southern Gulf which has more mixing with the Pacific. Also, the Gulf is amazingly deep and that should provide some buffer against warming which is concentrated in the upper part of the water column. This is not to say that global climate change is not happening–in the next few decades it will have a huge impact on all these fisheries.
How far south are you going? There are several research institutes with offices in La Paz who work on these subjects–you could arrange some meetings and maybe sign up to do some GIS work during your travels :-). Two places I’ve seen in research papers are CIBNOR and CICESE (Centro de Investigaciones de something or other :-). I doubt if I know anyone who works there but I’m probably one degree of separation away from somebody there–let me know and I’ll do some research, which would be more fun than my regular job I’m sure (but probably not as much fun as sailing the Sea of Cortez).
By the way, I’m surprised that triggerfish was so good. I’ve tasted a different species of triggerfish in Tahiti and it was OK but the meat-to-bone ratio left a little to be desired.
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