The enduring mystery of our only protected freshwater native fish

Wednesday, 14 February 2018

A drawing of a white spotted greyling (sic), dated 1889.

ANALYSIS: There are dozens of freshwater fish native to New Zealand, from slithering eels that roam the sea to tiny galaxiids that scale waterfalls, each of them entirely odd but impressive in their own way, much like our birds and kind of like ourselves.

But only one of them has full legal protection. Do you know which one?

A Teviot flathead galaxias, our rarest native fish. Its global population is confined to an area less than a hectare in Central Otago.

It's not the longfin eel, our elegant taonga that grow to enormous size and live human-length lives, which end with an epic migration to a deep ocean trench near Tonga.

It's not the lamprey, the pre-historic, boneless fish sometimes called the 'vampire of the sea' because it bleeds the life out of its prey, and begins life in our southern rivers, clambering up steep waterfalls with its mouth.

The last record of fishing for grayling, on the Waiapu River near Gisborne in 1923.

And it's not the Teviot flathead galaxias, the aquatic equivalent of the kākāpō, its entire global population confined to an area roughly the size of half a rugby field in a patchwork of small streams around the Teviot River in Central Otago.

The only native freshwater fish with full legal protection has not been seen by anyone alive today, because it no longer exists.

Native fish are the focus of three paragraphs in the Freshwater Fisheries Regulations 1983, which give full protection to the grayling, which had not been seen for 60 years.

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The last confirmed sighting of a grayling - narrow, small and quick, with a rusted orange streak - was in 1923. The species all but certainly became extinct at some point in the 1930s.

The grayling, however, became the first and last native freshwater fish to receive full legal protection, through a law passed in 1951. That law was reaffirmed in 1983, and remains in place today.

That law devotes three of its 75 paragraphs to native fish, the first of which begins like so: 'No person shall intentionally fish for, take, or kill grayling…'

By the time the most recent version of the law was passed, no one had seen a grayling for 60 years.

And yet, while the law includes rules around where fish offal can be placed, and who is legally responsible when someone is found possessing canned sports fish, it does not specifically protect any other native fish.

It broadly bans killing or taking native fish unless it's for scientific research or human consumption, which are extremely broad exceptions.

It means that under current law, you could face prison time for catching a trout or a salmon out of season, but you are legally entitled to kill a Canterbury mudfish, a native species on the brink of extinction, and throw it on the barbecue.

THE LOOPHOLE

'I think New Zealand's done a really bad job at protecting our native freshwater fish,' says Stella McQueen, a freshwater ecologist who specialises in native species.

She points to the fact some of our most threatened native species are not only unprotected, but harvested commercially - namely, longfin eels, and whitebait.

The fact that native freshwater fish are still unprotected, more than a century after most birds were given protected status, has been viewed by some ecologists as a strange double standard. There are at least 600 pieces of legislation that concern wildlife protection, and only one that gives legal protection to a native freshwater fish, which happened to be extinct.

As of 2013, nearly three-quarters of our native fish were at risk of extinction, among the highest proportion internationally. About half of those species are found nowhere else in the world, giving greater stakes to their demise.

Longfin eels, which have the same conservation status as Great Spotted Kiwi, are still exported to countries which have driven their own eel populations to extinction by doing the same thing, McQueen said. In 2012, it was discovered they were being used as an ingredient in gourmet cat food.

Freshwater ecologist Dr Mike Joy once likened the way we treat our native freshwater fish to something out of Monty Python. We protected the species that is already extinct after the fact, but have done nothing to protect the dozens that are increasingly at risk of joining it before our very eyes.

Many native species are protected under the Wildlife Act 1953, which effectively says you can't kill or capture any native animal, with a few exceptions. It's the reason you can't shoot kererū or have a pet tuatara.

Before that, most birds had protection through a law passed in 1910.

Reptiles have had full protection since around 1953, marine mammals since 1978, and hard corals since 2010. Freshwater fish are yet to join them.

In regards to the Wildlife Act, the loophole is in the word 'animal' - The Act does not apply to freshwater fish, because it does not deem them to be animals. It gives protection to four types of coral, three species of snail, and a dozen types of weevil, but the longfin eel, for the purposes of our prevailing wildlife protection law, is not an animal.

A host of marine fish have since been added to the Act, including various species of sharks and grouper, but freshwater fish are still excluded.

Despite efforts to fix this loophole, which has allowed commercial fishing of eels and whitebait to continue, no native fish have been given protection since the grayling. There have been efforts to do so - it is understood the Department of Conservation reviewed the matter itself at some point in the 2000s, an effort that stalled - but it has never been fixed.

It is largely because we see our native fish differently to our other native species, said freshwater ecologist Dr Richard Allibone.

'They have a PR problem, native fish,' he said.

'Most of them people never see, and they're not quite as exciting as a weta or a giant snail. Historically, the big fish were there to be eaten, the whitebait there to be caught, and the rest we don't notice.'

The reason we don't protect native fish is because they have always been viewed differently to our birds and our reptiles, he said. Efforts to change that had been deemed too difficult by the agencies involved, and nothing had ever happened.

The old-fashioned idea that fish were meant for harvesting, not protecting, continued.

'It's a historic legacy where we treat fish as a resource, not as a conservation-valued native species,' he said.

'We don't recognise them as something we protect, we recognise them as something we use.'

A LESSON NOT LEARNED

The grayling was once plentiful, and likely filled rivers across the country, similar to whitebait today.

Shortly after Europeans colonised New Zealand, the grayling population all but collapsed, and what was once a common fish disappeared suddenly, before most people realised what had happened. It is still unclear what caused the species to disappear so suddenly, but the factors were almost certainly human-caused.

One of the first scientists to take an interest in native fish, Gerald Stokell, was scathing of the grayling's extinction: 'There is one freshwater fish whose position today is a standing reproach on the administration of wildlife in New Zealand and a monument to the indifference with which many natural resources of this country have been treated,' he wrote in 1941.

And yet, it still took another decade for the grayling to finally receive protection. Far from being a cautionary tale, the extinction of the grayling has changed little about our attitudes to native freshwater fish.

'I don't think the loss of the grayling has stuck in anyone's mind,' McQueen said.

After many decades, there are signs that things are changing: Conservation Minister Eugenie Sage agreed that not enough was being done to protect native freshwater fish.

'It's ridiculous that while 72 percent of our native fish are at risk or threatened with extinction they have no legal protection,' she said.

'That needs to change.'

There are many ways to grant the protection needed to spare our fish from the fate that befell the grayling.

Legal protection, as we understand it for most of our native animals, would not be enough to prevent a stream home to native fish from being bulldozed, or stop warming temperatures from making their habitat unliveable.

Sage said she wanted to look at the bigger picture: Using an empowered DOC to become more involved in habitat restoration, and to use its expertise at local authority level.

'For many threatened native fish, being caught on a line or net is not the threat. Restoration of habitat and preventing further habitat loss is essential to ensure our native freshwater fish thrive,' she said.

'I've asked [DOC] to ramp up its work to implement its statutory function to advocate for conservation. In fresh water, that means getting more involved with council planning and resource consent processes, because councils need DOC's science and technical expertise on native fish if they are to make good decisions so that our native fish thrive.'

She said she was working with Environment Minister David Parker to make sure the Government's freshwater reforms improved fish habitat.

While legal protection may finally be on its way for our native freshwater fish, they are heading nearer to extinction, not further away.

New Zealand has long been known for its native birds, but its native fish are just as unique and unusual.

Small galaxiids have been found at the top of 60m waterfalls, which they scaled alone, like tiny Sir Ed Hillarys. Mudfish can live outside of water for weeks at a time, hibernating in small root hollows and damp leaves; Torrentfish are sleek and hardy, and live in the fiercest rapids they can find.

There are individual South American rivers which have more native species than exist in all of New Zealand, but ours have a character of our own - they are low-key, but capable of feats of heroism. They are more like us than we think.