How Will the County Address the Mullet Carcass Cleanup?

This time of year, mullet have moved off the flats to do their annual spawning. They congregate in massive schools and move offshore by the thousands, often resembling a black wave rolling through the water.

BRADENTON -- This time of year, mullet have moved off the flats to do their annual spawning. They congregate in massive schools and move offshore by the thousands, often resembling a black wave rolling through the water. The sight is accompanied by hundreds of mullet fishermen surrounding the school.

One cast will likely capture hundreds of pounds of mullet. But the fishermen aren’t after the fish meat, the roe is the valuable asset. Often times, male fish carcasses are tossed overboard to make room for more females. Officials are sick of footing the bill for the clean-up, but are they willing to do what it takes to eliminate the problem?

Mullet spawning season starts right before Thanksgiving and lasts throughout the cold weather months. The season reaches its peak in January, and then numbers start to dwindle in late February. This year has been particularly productive, drawing commercial fisherman to the Tampa Bay area from as far away as Alabama to catch females bearing red roe, which is prized as a delicacy – especially in Asia.  Nearly 1 million pounds of roe have been harvested this season alone. Some fishermen have caught as much as 9,000 pounds a day.

 This year the fish trade has been so lucrative, that fish houses like Cortez Bait and Seafood have stopped buying the mullet – they just couldn’t take on any more.  With a simple squeeze, a fisherman knows if the fish is male or female, and with no one to buy the fish, they end up throwing the male mullet back. While the males are not purposefully killed, many don’t make it and get carried inshore on the incoming tide, commonly ending up trapped in a canal behind a Longboat Key mansion. To say that owners are less than pleased would be an understatement.

“Long boat key canals have been full of dead mullet,” said Mayor Jim Brown at the Council of Governments meeting on Jan. 3, 2012. “This littering shouldn’t be allowed. The dead fish are coming through the pass, stinking up the place! We’ve had to hire people to come in and clean up the mess.”

No law prohibits fisherman from throwing the dead fish overboard, but this year, letters have been pouring in from tourists who are wondering, “what’s the deal with all the dead fish stinking up our vacation?”

“There are two ways the county can handle the mullet problem,” said Capt. Kris Winkle, a commercial mullet fisherman. “They can pay for the cleanup or they could set up a distribution center and subsidize the fisherman who bring in their male fish for a fair price. They could then feed the needy and hungry inexpensively—the latter would be cheaper.”

Commissioner Joe McClash liked the idea of giving back to the community. He said it seemed like a waste to carry perfectly good fish meat to a landfill when it could be frozen and sent to food banks or marketed to prisons statewide.

Commissioner Carol Whitmore said the county couldn’t compete with the market price for roe.

“Even if we paid them, they still get more for the roe and wouldn’t be willing to make room on their boat for the males,” she said.

But Winkle doesn’t agree.

“A fair amount would be 15 cents a pound,” said Winkle. “That’s $150 for ever thousand pounds. The municipalities pay four times that much for a cleanup crew.”

According to Winkle, the only other resolution would be to lobby the state to stop allowing so many out of state permits. Without a permit, boaters are only allowed to harvest about 50 mullet per person.

“These fisherman from other areas are directly competing with local fisherman,” said Winkle. “This is one of the greatest mullet areas in the world; 30 percent of the fisherman are from out of state.”

Winkle rationalizes that if the state reduced the amount of permits, local fish houses wouldn’t be over consumed with mullet and locals would get a better price for their catch.

“I really hate throwing the males back. They are my livelihood and I don’t want to kill them,” said Winkle.