Hardheads: are they really necessary?

That's the question my buddy, Malibu Kayaks VP Ken Larson, wanted me to answer today. Certainly they're good for at least one thing: my humility.

It happened like this ...

On a writer's junket to Getaway Adventures Lodge in Port Mansfield, I whiled away one evening under the dock lights with half a dozen other outdoor media types from around the country. One fellow, a TV producer from Midwest Outdoors, helpfully passed-on a tidbit he'd learned that very day.

"You might want to be careful with that," he cautioned as I swung a hefty 18-inch catfish up on the dock. "Bruce said their spines are poisonous."

"Venomous," I muttered to myself, secretly proud I knew the difference.

"Ah, it's alright. I've been catching these f*ckers since I was a kid," I replied noncholantly. "Grab 'em like this (I demonstrated, holding the fish firmly in my left hand, dorsal spine locked between my index and rude fingers) and you'll be okay."

About the time that last syllable fell from my lips, the damned fish squirmed, I lost my grip and got speared by a rigid pectoral spine at the base of my thumb. Deep.

Hurt like hell, too. My hand swelled-up like a grapefruit, turned red to the wrist and throbbed with every heartbeat. For days.

Embarassing, to say the least.

But aside from humbling the occassional haughty bay rat, are "tourist trout" really good for anything?

Most of us are pretty clear what we don't like about Arius felis, the sea or hardhead catfish: we don't like how slimy they are, we don't like it when they steal our bait, we don't like their nasty spines and we (Cajuns, probably, excluded) don't like to eat them. Plus, there are so damned many of the suckers, sometimes it's awfully hard to catch anything else.*

That argument contra catfish reflect what might be called an "anthropocentric" view. It's all about what does the fish do for us, people. It considers the instrumental, rather than intrinsic, value of the animal.

Here's what an ecologist colleague of mine, Dave Buzan, had to say about it: "I would say we need them … can anybody say exactly why? I’m not certain."

Dave told me that hardheads have a role in the ecosystem, and talked about structure and function and the movement of energy ... it all sounded very cool, but I don't think I was picking up what he was putting down. I wasn't getting it, but I made vague sounds of assent anyhow.

Finally, I could hear him do a kind of mental head-scratch on the other end of the telephone line.

"Even though we don’t love hardheads – or at least very few people love them – I think they play a role," Dave said, trying again. "It may be that what they’re doing … we know they tend to be bottom feeders – they may be picking up organic materials from the bottom, converting it to fish flesh and recirculating it through the water column either by growing, being eaten by other fish or pooping in the water and fertilizing plankton."

Then, in what may have been an effort to change the subject and scramble for firmer ground -- or maybe it was a gentle teaching moment -- he quoted the author of A Sand County Almanac, a man considered by many to be the father of wildlife ecology.

"There’s a pretty famous quote from Aldo Leopold," Dave told me:

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?' If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good whether we understand it or not. If the biota in the course of eons has built something we like but do not understand, who but a fool would discard seemingling useless parts. To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.

Leopold, I should point out, was born in Wisconsin and worked for the U.S. Forest Service. You can draw your own conclusions about whether he ever met a hardhead catfish.

It occurs to me that "good" and "bad" are value judgments and are pretty much subjective.

Climate change offers one example. If in fact the globe is warming, as most scientists agree, and sea levels will rise, that's a bad thing if you happen to live on a Pacific atoll or in Bangladesh.

But if you're an avid angler in Houston, global warming might be a good thing because it (apparently) is allowing snook and other tropical species to show up in increasing abundance at the northern edge of their ranges. Likewise, if you're a Norwegian oil exec or a Scottish farmer, ice-free seas and a longer growing season might be boons.

Getting rid of some animals -- the "bad" ones -- seems a no-brainer. I'd bet, for instance, no one cried when smallpox went the way of the Carolina parakeet.

The mosquito is an example of another animal that might fall into the "we'd be better off without 'em" category.

What purpose could a mosquito possibly serve? The bloodsucking females certainly don't pollinate anything; they're annoying and -- in many parts of the world -- deadly.

"But dragonflies eat them," someone will point out.

Yeah, but why do we like dragonflies so much -- aside from their aesthetic properties?

Because they eat mosquitos. Ditto for bats.

In fact, the best ecological argument for the mosquito's continued existence may rest on its most unpleasant feature -- a propensity to carry lethal diseases. Mozzies have long served to hold in check the populations of warm-blooded animals, including humans. Through yellow fever, malaria, dengue and other assorted nasties, in many parts of the world they still do.

According to the sometimes-accurate Wikipedia, mosquitos are estimated to transmit disease to more than 700 million people annually, and will be responsible for the deaths of about 1 in 17 people currently alive.

Clearly, mosquitos suck. Even more than hardheads.

Then there are the plants and animals -- usually those that are bad lost -- that are inarguably pernicious. Even staunch environmentalists don't care if we eradicate them from their non-native ranges, and there are many sound reasons for doing just that.

Red imported fire ants, for instance.

Fire ants have spread across the southeast since they were accidently loosed in Mobile, Alabama, in the 1930s. They got to Texas sometime during the Eisenhower Administration and were predicted to stop their advance on a line across the middle section of the state, around Austin. They're now firmly established in Oklahoma.

The voracious insects have displaced native species (and are one of the factors cited in the decline of the Texas Horned Lizard), periodically they decimate upland game bird populations such as quail and turkey and wreak havoc on electrical systems across the state. Seems they have a taste for insulation.

An animal as large -- and helpless -- as a newborn calf is at risk of becoming ant chow if born in a far corner of an infested pasture.

Fire ants may be fine in South America, where other creatures in their native ecosystem keep them in check, but they're hell on Texas. Here they cause an estimated $1.2 billion in damage annually. No one I know would balk at ridding our landscape of them.

If only we could.

Not all alien imports are "bad." Some exotic species Texans absolutely adore. The Chinese ringneck pheasant, for one. The Florida-strain largemouth bass, for another. That particular exotic was introduced deliberately -- still is stocked routinely -- and is everybody's buddy. Never mind the native species of bass it may have displaced.

But back to Ken's question, which ... if you've read this far, you know I'm not really going to be able to answer satisfactorily. I'll take a shot in the dark and side with Dave: hardheads may in fact be necessary in some way we don't yet understand.

But I bet we could do without them.

Blue crabs, whiting, black drum ... any number of friendlier, more useful species could take over the hardhead's seafloor garbage disposal duties. Pinfish, sand trout and Atlantic croaker could stand in for the tourists and children new to fishing the Texas coast. And for painful encounters with nature, well, we've always got prickly pear cactus, stingrays and ... fire ants.

In a 2004 New York Times article, ecologist and environmental ethicist Elizabeth Willot of the Univeristy of Arizona was asked whether she thought it was immoral to try to make a species go extinct, assuming one could do so without hurting other organisms.

Here's her answer:

"Striving for the unachievable is not an appropriate use of resources," she said. "If one acknowledges that eradication is highly unlikely to work or might have serious side effects, the moral thing to do would be to find another way."

Willot was speaking about mosquitos, specifically, but she followed that statement with advice that perhaps anglers could take to heart when dealing with hardheads: Take the middle ground and kill some of them some of the time.

Or, we could just let nature do it for us.

For three years in the mid-1990s, massive fish kills -- almost wholly hardheads -- occurred from Brazil to Belize to Texas to Alabama and Florida. At the time, one Florida angler told Dr. Jan Landsberg at the then-Florida Marine Research Institute: "When you find out what's killing them, dump some on my side of the bay."

Neither Florida nor Texas biologists ever did unravel the mystery of those fish kills.

"There are natural controls that we don’t understand and sometimes take a lot of time and effort to figure out" said Dave, who was in charge of investigating the Texas fish kills. "There was some speculation that it might have been an amoeba, or a virus. When certain animal populations get too big, something eventually will happen that will control them."

*the fact that hardheads prefer to eat bait -- dead bait fished on the bottom, especially -- combined with my amigo Ken's concern about the species ... well, it's a revealing clue about his angling style, don't you think?

[For a look at the ethics of mosquito eradication, see "No Mosquitos, No Problem? It's Not Quite That Simple," a June 22, 2004 New York Times article by James Gorman]