BY MERIT McCREA
SACRAMENTO – The resulting 2025 sand bass regulations coming out of the April 17th meeting of the California Fish and Game Commission followed the CDFW recommendation for a 4-fish sub-bag limit on barred sand bass within the 5-fish combined limit, with a 3-year sunset. Added was a review in 1 year.
The scene in Sacramento was Commissioner Eric Sklar going above and beyond to be there for this meeting despite a painful ankle injury. Without him there wouldn’t be a quorum of at least 3 of the appointed 5 commissioners and the meeting would have to be canceled.
Commissioners present were Sklar, Erika Zavaleta, and Samantha Murray. Absent were Darius Anderson and Jacque Hostler-Carmesen. Zavaleta would support a reduction to 2 fish for summer and voted no on the motion that did pass, which was moved by Sklar.
There was a bit of scary discussion around a desire for more restrictive measures, however the Commission ended up going with their previous commitment which followed the CDFW recommendation. A big part of this was also recognition for where the Commissioners absent would have likely landed.
Those present displayed a high degree of thoughtfulness and careful consideration about this important decision. Key constituents, the Sportfishing Association of California, CCA-Cal along with CDFW committed to actively supporting scientific efforts to fill in the missing pieces — understanding how the core sand bass population along the coast of Baja California influence, impacts and contributes to our fishery here episodically.
There was a commitment to attempt a stock assessment; however the big question is whether it’s possible to do, given that the data available to support it comes from our local waters yet the population is likely a mixing one with its core well south of the border.
While there is an abundance of scientific evidence from within California waters, especially since the early 2000s, what’s lacking according to long-time skippers was a tagging effort with the ability to show scientifically the occasional northward influx of large numbers of sand bass, one which long-time skippers think has been the primary source of the episodic booms in sand bass catches here in SoCal.
The Bight hasn’t seen a strong influx in the past two decades. In the absence of these data the existing science assumes SoCal sand bass populations are reliant on local production alone. Resident fish have not shown long-range migratory movement, only modest ones out to the bait areas on the flats and only a portion of our resident sand bass population appears to participate.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has proposed several science projects, after working with fisheries participants, SAC skippers, CCA-Cal representative and marine scientists.
So far these projects include both a DNA-based “kinship” study and otolith microchemistry, both of which target understanding the relatedness of sand bass here to those elsewhere, especially those in Mexican waters.
The CDFW also supports a cooperative study that gathers the lengths of the full range of sizes of sand bass that are caught, especially including those that are released. The goal is to get a better idea of what’s out there, from what is caught. The SAC fleet and CCA-Cal will facilitate these studies, and hope to recruit the assistance of CCA-Cal members on the water as well as SAC boat crews.
In addition, there is a desire to research where there might be better information in existing science on the strength of the smaller size classes of sand bass that typically recruit in our coastal bays and harbors. Commissioner Zavaleta pointed to the lack of these data in those they had available to their decision making. While both the fishery and SCUBA surveys are able to see fish from about the 10-inch size and up, it’s clear the smaller ones have so far been missed by the science they had to work from.
Finally, because the DNA kinship and otolith microchemistry methods are only backwards looking from the time samples of DNA and otoliths are collected, the SAC fleet is strongly in favor of a forward looking traditional tagging study, one which for the first time would include tagging and recovery efforts in Mexican waters as well.
In the past 20 years we have not seen a large influx of sand bass arriving to our local flats and so it’s likely these efforts will reflect that, and with it potentially little evidence of adult fish moving northward from Mexican waters.
SAC’s outreach with the Baja California Secretary of Fisheries, her staff and scientists in Ensenada have generated strong support for a cooperative tagging effort there. At the same time, we’re hearing the sand bass numbers off northern Baja are bursting at the seams so it’s likely they may spin off schools of migrating fish looking for forage and new waters to colonize in the near future.
Sand bass spawn in the summer months and out on the flats can coalesce into tight schools at times. Marine ecologists have characterized the sand bass presence on the flats as driven by spawning behavior and think the places where these schools form are consistent, static, compact and composed of a majority of the sand bass in the population during the summer months. It’s this thinking that has driven environmentalist support for closing sand bass fishing during summer months when they bite best – an outcome that was averted this past week.
