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From: john anderson
Date: 02-05-08
Time: 19:04
Clinton, I’ve got ‘A treasury of N.Z fishes’ Great book. If I could recommend one, ‘The Un-natural History of the Sea’ by Callum Roberts- 2000 years of human exploitation of the oceans. Aiyeeeeee! Not pretty. Regarding hapuku, I’m not following? Hapuku used to live in the shallows and now they don’t; no one is contesting that. What I am suspect of is the idea that hapuku were ‘fished out of the shallows’. Why didn’t/ don’t more simply migrate inshore to take advantage of the now untapped food resources available? As you point out, they could make a fine living off spiny dogs alone! At the PKs and elsewhere, there’d be enough pink mao mao and the like to feed huge herds of puks. The habitat is known to be suitable and they still live on deeper reefs a kilometre or less distant so it’d be a dawdle for them to make the trip? The only way I can see to explain their reluctance to recolonise the shallows, if not that they’d just prefer not to, is to assume that these shallow water fish of yours were a distinct ‘cultural group’ separate from the main population. Subject to huge fishing pressure, they were slowly fished to extinction? My problem with this is that it would be such an extraordinary angling feat! To put a bait or net in front of virtually every single individual of the ‘shallow water sub-population’, from the most in-accessible corner of Fiordland to every nook and cranny of Cape Maria? I can conceive of fishing them down hard, on account of the readiness with which they take a baited hook, but to the point where they’re to all intents and purposes extinct? I think not. And if we did it so brutally well to the shallow ones, how come we can’t repeat the process on the deep ones, which despite our apparent best efforts to fish them to extinction too, are still regularly caught at 5 mile reef, a mere,… well….5 miles off Whangarei? No, I don’t buy it: hapuku weren’t fished out of the shallows (though they were very likely severely fished down), they were fished out of the deep. Enough habitat was freed up in the hapuku equivalent of Remuera and like any suburbanite with enough good sense, the shallow puks took their opportunity to get out of The Hood.
Last changed: 02-May-2008