You may be wondering, who is Wild Oceans and what is its Kona Project?
Wild Oceans is the oldest saltwater fishery-oriented nonprofit organizations in the USA. Founded in 1973, Wild Oceans was originally known as the National Coalition for Marine Conservation (NCMC).
“Since our early days, we’ve recognized that fishing in wild oceans, where billfish, sharks and tunas roam, requires us to fish conser-vatively, to avoid indiscriminate gears that harm other species, and to preserve open-ocean habitat and the prey base they need to survive,” reads the Wild Oceans’ website.
That’s all well and good, one might say, but How? The “About Us” section of the website says this about that, “We built an unprecedented network of ocean stakeholders to strengthen federal law to end overfishing and restore depleted populations of fish.” As their original moniker indicates, they build coalitions for change.
People often say, “They should fix this,” or “They need to fix that,” referring to the government or any one of many “officials” deemed in charge of this or that. However, generations can roll by waiting for “they” to fix this or that. The nonprofit community exists to fill gaps between what people and natural resources really need and what “they” are doing about it.
When it comes to healthy stocks of saltwater fish, Wild Oceans also works to bridge gaps between what is and what can be. In the case of the Kona Project, one such gap to bridge is knowledge, or lack thereof.
The existing knowledge of the spawning, hatching and nursery grounds for marlin along the Kona Coast is fragmented at best. We know that they spawn in Kona waters, and that larval marlin can be found in the nearshore current slicks, but beyond that, we are mostly guessing. The Kona Project hopes to figure all this out.
Marlin are not true schooling fish like tuna, so you don’t find big schools of small blue marlin of the same age group hanging around sea mounts or FAD buoys as you do tuna. Movements of juvenile black marlin in Australia are well-known because they are more of a coastal species. Not so with the open ocean roaming blue marlin.
One reason for this gap in knowledge is because the tuna industry drives most of the research conducted on pelagic species, while marlin are looked upon in ways similar to how the Aunties viewed Cinderella. As e mple, striped marlin were declared depleted, overfished and continuing to experience overfishing back in 2019. Even though “officials” are mandated to establish stock rebuilding measures — not a thing has been done to that effect — and no research has been launched by the “officials” in charge.
Research has been funded to try and understand the lifecycle of yellowfin tuna in Hawaii, but knowledge gaps still exist for tuna too. According to a scientific paper published in 2020, “Local fisheries target adult tuna during the summer months, but subse-quent tuna movements, presumably away from the islands after reproduction ceases, remain undocumented.” Further, “Despite being a nursery area, whether the assem-blage is entirely produced and retained in the region (Hawaii) is not resolved.” If “they” don’t know it about tuna, then sure as you’re born “they” don’t know it about marlin.
This brings us to the nuts and bolts of the Wild Oceans Kona Project: Between the Kona Coast and the Cross Sea Mounts — and south of Kahoolawe, Lanai and Oahu — spins the “Kona Gyre,” the largest perpetual eddy system in all of the North Pacific ocean. This eddy is the turbine that provides the energy to the ocean ecosystem within the “boundaries” of this vast area.
Ask any akamai skipper how he finds fish and he will likely say something about reading the current. These are the currents generated by this gyre. How they interact with the buoys and bathymetry along the Kona Coast usually dictates where skippers choose to fish.
But this gyre affects more than where fish congregate to feed. Within this giant ecosys-tem is also what many scientists believe could be the most important spawning ground for pelagic fish across the North Pacific Ocean. That’s a stretch of more than 7,500 miles at this general latitude. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Nearshore slicks along the Kona Coast are known to be excellent habitat for a smorgasbord of fish larvae — even striped marlin, which was a surprise. However, very few studies have connected all areas of the Kona Gyre as integral parts of a greater, whole ecosystem.
Phase One is for the scientists to conduct a “meta study” which assembles an inventory of results from studies done on these topics in years past. This will help insure the Kona Project does not waste resources reinventing the wheel.
The general idea for Phase Two is to identify the locations where marlin larvae were caught in years past, and plot them over computer models depicting the gyre currents and conditions at those points in history. The idea is to try and see what conditions appeared favorable back then, and seek them out in real time, to see if that holds true today.
Unforeseen at the onset, but a timely reinforcement of import at present, is that none of the big marlin landed and examined in Kona this past summer were ripe for spawning — peak spawning season. Now, in winter, we have good fishing and an unusual number of spawning size females in the area but yet again, none of those examined have been ready to spawn. What does this indicate?
No one knows because no one has ever tied all this together. Understanding more about the entire life cycle of marlin is fundamental to insuring stability of the stocks into the future, which Wild Oceans hopes to translate into insuring fishers in Hawaii have good fishing, in perpetuity.
This is what the Kona Project is all about.
Without nonprofits working to bridge these knowledge gaps, the current strife facing striped marlin could become the fate of all marlin species because of one simple fact — there is nothing in place to prevent it.