The launch crews at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) may not have had time to notice, but for nearly four decades Cape Canaveral has been a real fish story.
We're talking world records here. And whenever there are fish stories, there is bound to be some controversy.
Cordoned off in the late 1950s as a buffer zone for fledgling NASA activities, a large area that eventually became the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida was already a natural sanctuary for many species of wildlife.
Coastal lagoons and lazy rivers dot the area, typically no more than 8 feet deep and nestled behind low-lying barrier islands. Extensive shallower regions allow fingerlings (small fish) to mature before larger prey gobbles them up.
Within the region, a 40-square-kilometer no-fishing zone has more recently served as a test case for protecting fish populations from another predator -- humans.
And the results are in: Within the no-fishing zone, populations of game fish are more than twice as abundant as in nearby fishable areas around KSC.
Since 1963, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has managed a chunk of NASA's land known as the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. Fishing is allowed in Mosquito Lagoon to the north, as well as in the South Banana River. Sandwiched between, just east of the launch pads, is the North Banana River, where the fish are safe.
In a study published last May in the North American Journal of Fisheries Management and made public recently, scientists say that five species of game fish are 2.6 times more prevalent inside the protected area -- and they're bigger, too.
Anglers' delight
The study isn't news to local anglers, who already had learned to troll border areas in search of a better catch.
At the time of the study, conducted between 1986 and 1990, anglers were "lining up around the boundaries of the closed areas and were obviously targeting fish coming out of the reserves," said National Marine Fisheries Service scientist James Bohnsack, who worked on the report.
That hasn't changed, says Phillip Stevens, a U.S. Geological Survey biologist at the Florida Caribbean Science Center. Stevens has just submitted another paper for peer review showing that fish tagged inside the protected area do migrate to surrounding water.
"Many of the fish ended up being recaptured outside of the restricted areas," Stevens said in a telephone interview. "The restricted areas within Merritt act as a reservoir that supplies fish to other areas."
Dorn Whitmore, supervisory refuge ranger at Merritt Island, agreed, adding that fishing pressure in the region has increased dramatically in the past two decades as Florida's human population has grown. The new residents are typically affluent and have lots of leisure time -- and they've figured out where to dangle their lines.
"Certainly (anglers) have caught onto the idea that this is a good fishery," said Whitmore, who was not involved in the study.
The fish species studied included spotted sea trout (see image), red drum, black drum, common snook and striped mullet. Of those, the black drum seemed to benefit most, being 12.8 times more abundant within the no-fish zone. Over a period of 18 months, 12,949 fish were tagged.
'We haven't done a good job'
The researchers point to the study as an example of how a no-fish zone can revitalize fisheries, while those in the commercial fishing industry don't always agree with the idea of sanctuaries.
Nevertheless, a proposal to establish another, much larger sanctuary is winding its way through a regulatory process that involves a half-dozen governmental agencies. The new "ecological reserve," as it would be called, is a proposed 250,000-square-mile area in and around the Dry Tortugas National Park in the Florida Keys.
"We haven't done a good job," said fisheries biologist Nicholas A. Funicelli of his own profession. Funicelli, an author of the Cape Canaveral fish study, said a lot of experts are realizing that oceanic sanctuaries may be necessary, just as land-based reserves have helped to preserve and restore non-aquatic animals.
The formal protection of aquatic areas in the United States dates back to 1972, and today there are 12 national marine sanctuaries covering about 18,000 square miles of ocean and coasts. The area around Cape Canaveral is thought to be among the largest and most pristine.
For the angler in search of a trophy catch, new scientific results, expected to be released soon, might provide all the argument needed for creating protected fish nurseries. Bohnsack told space.com he's working on another paper regarding a study of the Cape Canaveral no-fishing zone, showing that "an unusually large number of world record fish were landed in the immediate surrounding area."
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