Durban - They call him “Scarface”, possibly the luckiest – or dumbest – fish in South Africa.
Scarface is a big, ugly yellowbelly rock cod who continues to patrol his favourite reef on the Wild Coast, just south of Port Edward, seemingly against all odds.
He has been hooked and released, hooked and released, hooked and released …Well, let’s just say that if Scarface was a cat, he would have exhausted all his proverbial lives.
Nine times. That is how often Scarface has been caught, tagged and released in just four years by conservation-conscious anglers.
Scarface is also one the poster boys of a citizen science project that started in Durban just over 30 years ago, at a time when some sea anglers were having second thoughts about killing and keeping every fish they caught.
In 1984 local marine researcher and former director of the Oceanographic Research Institute (ORI) Rudy van der Elst seized on the idea of encouraging fishermen to release some of the fish they caught, helping researchers to learn a bit more about the sea fishes of South Africa by inserting a marker tag into their bodies so they could be tracked and studied more closely.
Speaking at a function in Durban to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the ORI Co-operative Fish Tagging Project, University of Cape Town associate professor Colin Attwood recalled “tagging” his first fish back in 1986. It was a time when several anglers were starting to realise that far from there being plenty of fish in the sea, “we are now running out of fish”.
Since then, just over 285 000 fish have been caught, tagged and released off South Africa’s coastline by almost 5 500 anglers.
Among them is Western Cape angler Simon Walker who personally has tagged and released 4 927 fish, while anglers Tony Oates and Franz Klimas have tagged 4 342 and 3 415 fish respectively.
Some, like the speckled snapper, are recaptured more often than others because they tend to stay in the same place.
Other species are more wide-ranging.
A yellowfin tuna tagged off Cape Point swam for 5 200km before it was recaptured near the Seychelles two years later.
Others include a red steenbras caught and tagged in the Tsitsikamma National Park in 1989. It swam free for 22 years before it was rehooked off Kei Mouth in 2001.
A ragged-tooth shark hooked at Southbroom also remained at liberty for just over 22 years before being recaptured at Mossel Bay in 2011.
Stuart Dunlop, the project’s tagging officer, says the project is still going strong as it enters its 31st consecutive year.
“Not only has this project helped us to learn more about fish movement patterns, growth rates, death rates and population dynamics, it has also made a major contribution towards changing the ethics of anglers towards catching and releasing fish.”
The Mercury