A whitebait stand on the Mōkau. Photo Paul Charman.
MY four days of whitebaiting on the Mōkau and Awakino rivers last month produced a mere two half cups of the elusive delicacy.
That said, one of those cups was given to us by a more experienced whitebaiter working on the far bank of the Awakino River; a woman who took pity on us after noting our meagre results.
It’s not a serious complaint. Me and my three companions had a great time in our rented house near the beach; the whitebaiting just provided an excuse for a relaxing holiday spent in lovely surroundings.
And enough fish was caught to provide for two good meals of whitebait fritters, which my son, Elliot, rated as a highlight of our Mōkau holiday, right up there with playing 500 every evening.
But asking around revealed that our inexperienced whitebaiting party was not alone in achieving poor results. And I wondered how long such an apparently depleted fishery could go on bringing tourists to the area.
Three residents were asked if they thought it was time to restrict commercial exploitation to preserve the fishery and all agreed it was worth a try. But most I spoke to took a head-in-the sand approach, saying there were good years and bad years, and nobody could predict how the fish would run.
Fresh water scientist Mike Joy, of Victoria University, is more emphatic.
Mike said 74% of our native fish were listed as threatened and four out of five of the fish which made up the fish collective known as whitebait were species are on that list.
“There are multiple causes, but harvesting the juveniles will be the nail in coffin and commercial exploitation just adds unnecessary pressure,” Mike said.
“You would think the government would be all over this situation, given how long we’ve known about it and how quickly it’s worsening.
“Guess how many native species are specifically protected under the Freshwater Fisheries Act. One. This would at least be good news for that one species, except that it’s the grayling, and the grayling had been extinct for five decades when the law was passed.
“Mind you, the law does grant protection to introduced fish such as trout and salmon.
“Imagine if we protected goats and deer instead of kiwi and kereru.
“All other native fish species have legal protection if they are not used for ‘human consumption or scientific purposes’.
“In practice, this translates to zero protection. Freshwater crayfish: threatened. We eat them. Freshwater mussels: threatened. We eat them. We harvest five species for fun and profit under the name ‘whitebait’, the īnanga, the kōaro, the banded kōkopu, the giant kōkopu and the shortjaw kōkopu.
“Of these, only the banded kōkopu is not threatened. Any time you eat a whitebait fritter, you’re eating the juveniles of native species that in all likelihood won’t be around much longer.
“Meanwhile, the Department of Conservation, the agency charged with regulating whitebait, has been missing in action. The rules governing whitebaiting have not been meaningfully changed since their inception, though they’re based on out-of-date science and would offer inadequate protection even if they were properly enforced, which they’re not.
“It is strictly forbidden to take whitebait at night, for instance, a rule which was put in place to ensure some of these juveniles make it up the river safely. But whitebait don’t move at night, and we’ve known that for decades.
“What we’re seeing with native fish and the decline in our freshwater quality is a clear and urgent crisis. But it isn’t a mysterious one, and it isn’t one we can’t fix if we want to. When you look at the statistics on species decline, it’s pretty clear that they’re bad everywhere outside of the conservation estate, but worse anywhere we’re practicing intensive farming.
“We need to match land use to soil types and slopes to control runoff, we need major reductions in intensity, and we need to look hard at the way local councils are charged with protecting both the economy and the environment when they apply the Resource Management Act … and yet somehow always end up letting the economy win. We’ve been trying to have our cake and eat it. We need to stop or soon there won’t even be crumbs left.”
