Abstract

The Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI) have some of the highest densities of groupers in the Wider Caribbean Region. Typically, this is explained by the fact that local fisheries focus on spiny lobster (Panulirus argus) and queen conch (Aliger gigas), and up until the advent of tourism in the 1980s, reef fishes were only caught opportunistically. Thus, it is assumed that historical fishing pressure on groupers and their spawning aggregations remained relatively limited. Between December 2014 and March 2015, unstructured interviews were conducted throughout the TCI to assess fishers’ ecological knowledge of spawning aggregations of Nassau grouper (see Calosso and Claydon 2015). However, during these interviews, 13 fishers, all from the island of South Caicos, also spoke about an intensive fishery that specifically targeted yellowfin groupers (Mycteroperca venenosa), locally know as ‘rockfish’. The fishery was reportedly in operation for about 30 years, ending in the late 1970s or early 1980s, with one respondent stating that the fishery dated as far back as the 1940s. All interviewees identified ‘Fish Rock’ as the specific site where fishing concentrated, a location less than 500m from the south coast of the island of South Caicos, in an area that is now included in the Admiral Cockburn Land and Sea National Park, a no-take marine protected area established in 1992. In the early years, the fishery operated without motorised vessels, and fishers rowed flat bottomed boats or sailed sloops from the town of Cockburn Harbour in South Caicos to Fish Rock, a distance of approximately 3km. Fishers carried sacks full of waste products from the lobster and conch fisheries and laid these at Fish Rock to attract the yellowfin groupers and catch them with handlines. In the years before refrigeration was available, rockfish were ‘corned’, a process to preserve fish through salting and drying in the sun.

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