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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 33 Number 1
September 2005
Monkfish eat yellowtail: Tags taken from monk bellies prove it
WOODS HOLE, MA – Edwin D’Eon of Nova Scotia caught a monkfish on July 3 while working from the trawler D’Entremont I in Canadian waters. In its belly, he found a bright pink tag still attached to a fairly decomposed fish.
Come to find out, the mushy mess was a yellowtail flounder tagged in US waters in Closed Area II on Georges Bank on Sept. 3, 2004. D’Eon couldn’t get a good sense of the size of the fish because of its digested condition, but he turned the tag over to a Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans port agent, who mailed it to the Northeast Fisheries Science Center.
Roughly three months earlier, on April 10, Charlie Dodge, working from the Chatham, MA-based Edward & Joseph, caught a monkfish in 86 fathoms of waters in stock Area 537. This monkfish, too, had a tag in its stomach.
There was nothing left to the tagged fish, but Dodge kept the bright pink disk, called the toll free number, and turned the tag in to the science center.
As it turned out, this yellowtail had been released from the New Bedford-based Trident in Closed Area II on Sept. 4, 2004 on the same trip as the Canadian-caught fish.
Here’s one more story.
Rob Walz was fishing this winter just after New Year’s in Area 539 aboard his Tiverton, RI-based Finast Kind II. On Jan. 3, he caught a monkfish with a disk tag in its belly. The yellowtail itself was too digested to measure, but based on the tag number, it was clear the fish was originally released on May 15, 2004 from the Heritage in Area 537.
Great info
According to biologist Azure Westwood, who’s based at the science center and coordinating the yellowtail tagging project, fishermen should always report a tagged fish, even if it’s in poor condition or partially eaten, and any details about the tag or the fish itself are greatly appreciated.
Of the four recaptures from monkfish bellies that have come in to date, Westwood said, “All of those fish were in a pretty well-digested state.”
Still, the tags alone provided valuable information about how far the fish had traveled and how much time they had spent at large after being tagged.
The big unanswered question seems to be: Did these tags travel while the yellowtail were still at large, or did they travel by being in the bellies of moving monkfish?
According to Anne Richards, who heads up the science center’s monkfish surveys, monkfish are voracious feeders, eating just about anything that moves. She’s even found work gloves in monkfish bellies. This proof that monkfish eat yellowtail didn’t come as any surprise to her.
Nonetheless, it’s not an easy thing to document. The science center has been collecting stomach content information for decades, and although the database includes information from more than 10,000 analyzed monkfish bellies, only a handful of those stomachs contained anything that could be positively identified as a yellowtail.
In large part, that’s because the digestion process increases the chances of having an “unidentified flounder” vs. a definitive ID for any single flatfish species.
What’s most intriguing to Richards is that fishermen, in all probability, weren’t looking for these tags in monkfish. They stumbled upon them.
“It really makes me wonder how many you would find if people were actually looking for them,” she said.
Janice M. Plante
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