Hurricane Nicholas, Fish Kills And Redfish Rebounds

Hurricane Nicholas hit the Texas Coast in the Matagorda Peninsula Tuesday.

It brought with it storm surge some are estimating at five feet in some areas, winds up to 75 miles per hour and lots of rain. The storm blew through Texas pretty quickly and is still impacting Louisiana as a tropical depression dumping rain on areas already damaged by Hurricane Ida a few weeks ago.

This got me to thinking about the health of our fisheries and I could not help but reflect on all of the major traumatic events the have happened here in the last two decades.

In 1998 Tropical Storm Frances caused a major fish kill on Sabine Lake and in surrounding waters that killed untold number of flounder, shrimp, mullet, menhaden and other species. I remember cruising the lake with Capt. Skip James and seeing the entire shoreline of East Pass lined with dead flounder. In France’s aftermath, Texas Parks & Wildlife Department officials sent a news release out noting more than 100,000 dead flounder near Freeport.

Flounder are susceptible to storm kills this time of year because large numbers of them are staging in the marsh. When storm surges are huge rains hit, water in marsh degrades and oxygen levels drop causing huge kills of baitfish as well as flounder, croaker and a few other species. Typically reds and trout are not hit as hard.

Fast forward a few years and we got Hurricane Rita which caused major saltwater fish kills but also did major damage to inland fisheries such as rice canals, bayou systems and private pondJust three years later we got Ike which caused perhaps the greatest damage we have seen in many decades to our fisheries and fishing infrastructure from Galveston Bay to Cameron, La.

I knew it was bad when driving back from evacuation I found some dead redfish and trout a few blocks from my house. Some fish were stuck in fences while others were in yards and parking lots.

Hurricane Harvey caused some big fish kills, especially of baitfish, on the Upper Coast and Louisiana experienced some major kills last year with Hurricanes Laura and Delta.

Sometimes tropical storms cause more damage than full-blown hurricanes to our fisheries. If you have any photos, videos or reports of kills related to Nicholas please send to cmoore@fishgame.com.

There is one slight silver lining to storms hitting the coast in relation to our fisheries.

The peak hurricane season is also peak season for redfish spawning and storms get reds really eager to breed.

Hurricane waters literally take the fertilized eggs and ultra small reds already born and push them into marshes where they get into prime estuary. Studies conducted in the 1960s in South Texas show big hurricanes that pushed into Lower Laguna Madre coincided with the biggest redfish crop recorded up to that time.

A couple of years after Ike, farmers in Cameron Parish reported redfish in their ponds that had been placed there by the storm.

There are better ways for us to boost our redfish population but when it comes to storms, we’ll take any positive.

Chester Moore