Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute celebrated a major milestone Thursday with the release of the 3 millionth white seabass into the wild.
According to UC San Diego's Sea Grant program, the white seabass is not a bass at all. It's a croaker species native to the West Coast, found from Baja California to Alaska.
The release is part of a decade-long effort to restore and sustain California’s fisheries.
The institute's former board chair, Bill Shedd, had the honor of releasing the ceremonial 3 millionth white seabass using a golden net. The fish was dropped into a trough that's connected to a plastic tube leading to the Agua Hedionda Lagoon.
The seabass was hatched and raised at Hubbs-Seaworld's Carlsbad campus.
“Getting to 3 million has taken a fair amount of time," the institute's Sustainable Seafood Program director Mark Drawbridge said. "It's a fishery that has been depleted over time, through overfishing and loss of habitat, climate change.”
Between the 1960s and '80s, the white seabass population plummeted. So in 1983, Hubbs, the recreational fishing community and the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife banded together to establish this program.
"They play an important role in the ecosystem," he said. "They're found coastal here, around rocky reefs and in kelp beds and so forth."
Nature was in action during the release. Half a dozen pelicans descended on the site for a free lunch, despite some efforts to keep them away.
Typically, the fish are released through the seapen in the middle of the lagoon, Drawbridge said. This is the first time the institute has used this method to release them.
"We're trying to test different acclimation strategies to see how important we feel those acclimation cages actually are in the release process," he said.
It's to test which method has the best survival rate, Drawbridge said. The program has been successful as the white seabass population has bounced back. Studies have shown that about 30% of the wild adult white seabass population is from the program.
Mariana Kawakami, the hatchery manager at Hubbs-Seaworld, said each fish was tagged before it was released. The tags are embedded in each fish's cheek.
“We ask for the fishermen to please save your (white seabass) head, don’t donate head,” she said.
“We can get at information which batch it came from, where (it) was raised, how (it) was released, where (it) was released and where (it) was captured,” Kawakami said.
The institute is one of the few marine fish hatcheries in the U.S. dedicated to research and replenishment of fish populations. It releases about 70,000 fish per year.
