Piscatorial Porn: How Texas Parks and Wildlife Are Saving Our Seas

David Abrego sits behind his desk at Sea Center Texas with the words "Make It Happen" written in red capital letters on the white erase board running the length of his industrialized, sparse office. On the opposite wall, a long procession of floor to ceiling plate glass windows look out on a large field covered by huge saltwater tanks. While Dr. Abrego and I sit and discuss the nuances of hatcheries science, workers in yellow slickers and big, black rubber boots roam a complex maze of ponds. Each worker carries a long pole that appears more suited for cleaning pools than maintaining one of the largest coastal fish hatcheries in the United States. Every once and awhile, a worker will stop and scoop a dead fish from the surface of one of the ponds. The yellowed covered worker quickly places the tiny corpse in a plastic bag for a rigorous autopsy back in the lab to determine the exact cause of death.

Sitting behind his cluttered metal desk, surrounded with breeding fish, and with his round, smiling face, Dr. Abrego is the Dr. Ruth of fish sex. It suddenly occurs as I witness the timing, efficiency, and care that goes into the process what the large red block letters behind Dr. Abrego mean. The "Make It Happen" was a reminder from Texas Parks and Wildlife's Head of Coastal Fisheries Enhancement Director, Dr. Robert Vega, to make the resident speckled trout, red drum, and flounder so content and happy the only responsibility the lucky fish have is to spawn: in human parlance and in definition, have sex all day.

Sea Center Texas is the centerpiece of Texas Parks and Wildlife's Coastal Fisheries Enhancement Division, but TPW also manages the Coastal Conservation Association and Central Power and Lighting Hatchery in Corpus Christi and the Perry R. Bass Hatchery in Palacios. All three hatcheries contribute to the breed and stock programs that protect Texas fisheries from the stress of a 4.9 billion dollar a year recreational fishing industry. Together, the three hatcheries and the TPW Coastal Enhancement Division stock Texas bay systems with approximately twenty-five million hatchery raised fingerlings a year. The TPW enhancement program is one of the largest and most visible enhancement programs in the world.

David Abrego describes the science behind fish breeding as a "complexly simple process of simulating and manipulating environmental processes that lead fish to spawn." The mad scientists in the Coastal Fisheries Enhancement Division simulate cold fronts, lunar cycles, and seasonal lighting cycles or photoelectric patterns, to set an aphrodisiacal mood to get finicky fish frisky and illicit a spawning event. In a new, aquariumed twist to the seventies show 'Three's Company,' each male specimen rooms in a fifteen hundred gallon tank with five females with the express responsibility of propagating the species.

The piscatorial love nests are built in large fifteen foot circles that create a gently rotating current. The slow vortex ensures oxygenation and protects the fertilized eggs from parental predation-it is a rough world when you're a little fish. TPW marine biologist Shane Bonnot explains the hatching process, "Once an egg is fertilized, a small bead of oil forms in the larval sac causing the egg to float. To separate the fertilized egg from the breeding tank, the egg travels through a flume." As Shane points to the flume, a young boy on a school tour says, "It looks like a little water slide." Shane and I laugh. Shane continues, "The gravity induced flume recycles the water back into the original tank with the egg depositing itself into a small screen netting where it is manually transported to a separate climate and temperature controlled incubation room."

Shane ushers me out of the humming and humid nursery room through a large set of double swinging metal doors and down a labyrinthine maze of hallways. The room we enter is full of small opalescent, white plastic tubs packed neatly in rows. The dank, hot cinder-blocked room, although expressly used to usher life into the world, feels crypt-like and our words drown in the wetness of the humid air. "Once we move the egg in here," Shane continues, " we subject it to a decreasing salinity level which bursts the small oil larval sac and a fry is born. I then carefully transfer the one millimeter larvae outside to the holding tanks."

"The entire process is really remarkable," Bonnot says. "For most of the brood fish, we catch them in the wild by hook and line. We then nurture them for five years and watch them breed millions of fish. We cultivate their spawn from roe, to larvae, to three-inch size fingerlings." Shane beams like a father describing the process. "Once the fish get to a heartier, viable fingerling size, we vacuum them out of the outdoor holding tanks and take them to one of their five destinations." TPW only stocks bay systems with fingerlings spawned by fish from the corresponding bay ecosystem to maintain genetic integrity. "Where we pump them right out of the same tub we vacuumed them up with. The entire process only takes from spawn to stock about four months. It really is quite remarkable."

The reliability and simplicity of these spawning events, however, is only the tip of the Fisheries Enhancement's iceberg and the actual beginning of the hard work. To put this much care and effort into bearing these fish would be a malefic waste of time and energy if qualifiable results were not measured to determine the success of the stocking programs. To date, red-drum are the only fish in the Texas hatcheries pantheon that have reliably defined genetic markers that can report from where and when a fish was hatched.

Ruben Chavez, TPW hatcheries biologists, says, "We can determine from a few genetic markers who the fish's parents all the way down to which holding tank they were spawned."

With trout the number one sought after gamefish on the Texas coast, the subsequent fishing pressure placed upon it due to its popularity, and the relative fragility of the species, it's important that TPW find ways to track their efforts.

As Chavez escorts me down a dimly lit corridor, we hang sudden right and the bright fluorescents of Dr. Ivonne Blandon's lab cause me to squint. The wavering rays of the overheads reflect the pale blue of her summer linen shirt. She turns and extends a blue-gloved hand that is slightly darker than her flower embroidered shirt.

"I'm sorry," she says as she strips of the blue surgical glove and re-extends her hand.

Ivonne, as she asked to be called, is working on mapping the genetic markers of the Speckled Sea Trout. As of the summer, she was about 80% of the way through the mapping process. The Coastal Fisheries Enhancement folks are not trying to morph genetic superior monsters like their counterparts over at the Inland Fisheries Division; they are trying to simply track a very economically important fish through Texas bays and estuaries. Somewhere between isoclinal genetics and chromosomal anomalies, my head spinning trying to remember college biology and genetics class terms and meanings, Ivonne's passion came through her discourse on genetics.

"Do you want to see something really cool," she asked.

We darted across the hallway into a room that reminded me of the genetics classrooms back on the east coast that I couldn't remember what I learned, but the tangy, pungent smell of formaldehyde quickly brought back a few memories. She reached into a cavernous icebox and pulled out a tray of fingerling trout. Half of the trout were four to five inches long with the others half a paltry two and a half inches long. The fish were all exactly thirty days old. Thirty days is when Dr. Robert Vega likes to stock the fish because they now have a fighting chance of hiding from predation and braving the elements: this summer though, locked in the throes of a two year drought, the policy has moved out to a fifty day fingerling.

"We're looking into why these fish grow so differently," she said. "Are their environmental conditions different? Are their differences in their parents genetic make-up that makes them grow so much quicker?" She shrugged her shoulders, "I don't know, but I love finding the answers out."

To find the answer, she dissects a small trout and pulls out an ear bone called an otolith. Dr. Greg Stunz of Texas A&M Corpus Christi describes otoliths as, "the recording engine of the fish." Dr. Stunz is kind of the Robert Redford of fisheries science. He is ruggedly good-looking and has an infectious personality that bleeds his passion for fish.

"Each day one of these little guys swim around in our bays," he says, " these otoliths record each days' water conditions, temperature, and the fish's rough location." Greg's voice and body language becomes more animated the longer the conversation goes. "We really don't know much about the migratory or moving patterns of these fish," he says, " but we're going to find out."

This elucidates the importance of Ivonne's work and Greg's upcoming acoustical studies to follow trouts migratory patterns. Greg's interest in the trout's migratory patterns started a few years ago when he was studying the mortality effects of handling on trout during tournament fishing. His team tagged a number of fish in a Rockport Troutmasters Tournament and followed the fishes habits for thirty days following the tournament. Surprisingly, a number of the fish returned to the exact location they were caught. The furtherest travelled over 9-miles to get home, and the most interesting two fish, not once, not twice, but three times not only returned to their homes, but were captured three times before finally being killed in a kill tournament.

"By learning their, if any, migratory patterns," Greg says, "we can help TPW track their hatchery fish during stocking data assessments and glean better numbers for stocking success."

Robin Reichers, TPW Head of Coastal Fisheries, is excited.

"With the work the guys like Ivonne, Bill Karel, David Abrego, and Robert Vega are doing at our hatcheries, the future for Texas fishermen looks bright." Robin wrings his hands and leans forward on the balls of his feet leaning in close. "We have the brightest biologists working for us. This stuff is exciting."