Concerns about Atchafalaya Basin as fish populations decrease | Louisiana Outdoors

It’s difficult to know which step Louisiana is taking when it comes to the Atchafalaya Basin.

Tuesday night certainly wasn’t the first one. The first step happened more than 50 years when a coalition of recreational and commercial fishermen, conservationists and environmentalists banded together to thwart a US Army Corps of Engineers’ plan to dig a 100,000-foot cross-section through this vast area.

The move would’ve drained our country’s largest overflow swamp and brought devastating effects to crawfishermen on the commercial side, and for the increasing by thousands of those who covered bass, sac-a-lait, bluegill and chinquapin.

That coalition worked — then, but not now.

And that brings us back to Tuesday.

The Department of Wildlife and Fisheries called a public meeting to discuss the Basin. The agency’s fisheries biologist in its Lafayette office, Brac Salyers, navigated through a series of slides and data showing variances in age distribution in distinct decreases in bass population. The inference was there would be the similar trends in the sca-a-lait and bream populations.

Bass fishermen have been complaining about what they’re seeing — and not seeing — in the Atchafalaya for several years, and when a couple of voices caught the right ears, the meeting was announced. Commercial fishermen, especially crawfishermen, were complaining, too.

It was clear the Corps continues to operate on the belief its primary objectives are navigation and flood control, and its projects in the sprawling Basin continue to show the disastrous effects that narrow scope can bring to a unique ecosystem like the Atchafalaya Basin, called “Basin ” on its west side and “Spillway” by most living on the east side of the guide levees.

It would take a much longer treatise to outline how and why the Basin is there, but it is designed to serve as a spillway in the event of unusually high springtime floods along the Mississippi River.

The Corps continues to dredge the river and other navigational channels and deposit the material on higher spoil banks, places that years before could be topped by sheetwater flooding during the spring rise. Higher banks cut off that flow and led to vast areas of swamp where water was void of dissolved oxygen.

The dredging also releases silt-laden waters, which, when slowed, deposited silt in places that cut off access to anyone who had known the areas to be productive recreational and commercial fishing locations.

So, with little or no flow and little if any access, these once-productive places were undergoing a process called putrefaction — death by decay — a rotting process which renders those backwater areas sterile when it comes to maintaining fish-loving habitat, not only for recreational species like bass, sac-a-lait and bream, but also for commercially viable species like crawfish, catfish, gar, buffalo and other “roughfish.”

A fisherman’s complaints apparently found the right ear in newly installed LDWF secretary Madison Sheahan, whose intervention led to Tuesday’s jammed-packed meeting room at the LDWF’s state headquarters in Baton Rouge.

The increasing silt problems aren’t just a fish-habitat problem. Silt has laid waste to dozens of what once were viable waterways, including Bayou Pigeon, a major east-west waterway in the heart of the Basin. The silt has built up to the point where this once wide bayou has barely enough room for recreational boats to pass safely past one another.

A recently struck agreement with the Corps is a plan to dredge parts of Bayou Pigeon to make it passable again.

What about the fish?

“Well, it’s more than the fish,” Toby Poirrier said after testing Tuesday. “It’s the overall health of the Atchafalaya Basin. The middle of the Basin is stagnant, and if we can make the Basin a healthy environment again, then everybody would be rewarded, the guys who catch shad, the crawfishermen and those of us who love to catch bass, sac-a-lait and bream. Everybody would be happier.”

Poirrier admitted he cornered Sheahan for a few minutes earlier this year with those concerns.

From Tuesday’s meeting, it was clear the siltation and dredging was a major problem. Water quality, limited access, declines in fish populations and funding continued to plague moves to enhance the Basin’s overall health and ability to provide the economic driver it had been for most of the past 80 years.

The near 200 people who showed up for Tuesday’s meeting was enhanced by the 300-plus who attended the third annual Every Fish Matters banquet in Napoleonville, a town on the east side of both the Atchafalaya Spillway and across-the-levee Verret Basin.

EFM is the brainchild of Cliff Crochetthe touring pro bass angler who was born and raised in Pierre Part, a town that straddles the Atchafalaya and Verret waters.

Since a previous Wildlife and Fisheries administration’s decision stopped stocking Florida-strain bass fingerlings from its hatchery into the Atchafalaya, Crochet enlisted other local bass anglers to restock these waters. (The reason was the Atchafalaya was not a trophy-bass location.)

The first year’s fundraising efforts had enough money for 15,000 fingerlings and 50,000 more in May 2023. Last year’s banquet brought in enough cash for 82,000 more tiny bass.

“Every Fish Matters began when I realized something needed to happen because nothing was going on,” Crochet said. “OK, so raise money, get as many fish as possible and as many fishermen involved as possible — more money raised, more fish.”

As it turned out, EFM became a movement.

“We needed to kick the ant pile,” Crochet said. “It was more than about fish. It was promoting conservation, and working with other conservation groups to go to Wildlife and Fisheries and ask questions. It turned out we wanted to bring the whole issue (of the Atchafalaya) to someone who could help.

“Water quality is the main point in whole discussion. (Fish) stocking is what got us to this point, to raise awareness and take steps to get area back to what the basin can be,” he said. “At least we’re trying and not sitting on our hands and waiting for someone else to do it. That’s what south Louisiana people do.”

Salyers said a second public meeting will be held in Lafayette at a time and place to be announced.

The commission

Setting the date or dates for the opening of the fall inshore shrimp season tops the agenda for Thursday’s 9:30 am Wildlife and Fisheries Commission inside state Wildlife and Fisheries headquarters on Quail Drive in Baton Rouge.

The seven-member group also is scheduled to hear presentations and proposals from Ducks Unlimited and Delta Waterfowl on funding for their projects on waterfowl nesting grounds; crab closure areas and dates for the derelict trap removal program; and, a proposed opening of an oyster season in the East/West Cote Blanche bays and Vermilion Bay public oyster seed grounds.

Red snapper

The latest private recreational red snapper landing estimates hit 656,241 pounds through the July 14 period. That’s 70.2% of our state’s 934,587-pound annual allocation.