Advice & Info: Snapper Fishing - Kina for berley

Kina (sea urchins) are a great Kiwi stand-by when it comes to enticing snapper around the rocks, or when fishing out of the boat over shallow reef.

They have the great advantage of coming pre-packaged in a heavy shell, so sink nicely once cracked and thrown in the water. Numerous fish love them. When bits of kina start wafting through the water it is like a dinner bell going off. The only real problem with them is that they can be a bit of a pain to collect. Watch those spines!

I found myself using a lot of kina this autumn and winter. We typically do a lot of rock fishing during this time of the year. This year was no exception; there were some big tides and plenty of kina available in the rock pools. What was quickly evident however, was their poor condition. There was no roe in any of them, and as everyone knows, a kina without roe is like an egg without a yolk.

They were still okay as berley, but without those thick layers of kina roe lining the inside of the shell there was little substance to them. Every time I collected a pile I'd find they'd be gone in a flash. Big, fat, roe-ed up kina are obviously better for use as berley, as they are for eating, with the fish not really showing much interest in the skinny kina.

It appeared that the lingering water warmth we had in the autumn was keeping the kina skinny; they typically get fat roes in the cooler months. The extended water warmth of autumn also seemed to delay the annual run of good-sized snapper we get around the open coast rocks from about mid-April onwards. This year the rock fishing was still very tame by the end of May. Only an abundance of kingfish inshore was keeping everybody smiling.

I started to wonder if there was any link between the quality of the kina and the presence of the snapper on the coast.

Then winter arrived, as it had to. It came with a jolting suddenness that made many of us crawl indoors and stay there. The wind turned towards Antarctica, there was plenty of early snow down south, and the water temperature plummeted. I basically figured that the transition from autumn weather to winter weather had been so abrupt that the inshore late-season run of better than average snapper into shallow rocky areas simply wasn't going to happen. My fishing virtually ended for the year.

Then Josh turned up on his mid-year university holidays. The weather was absolutely disgusting, but he went fishing anyway. Predictably he caught a heap of very nice fish and they were all bursting at the seams with kina.

The weather deteriorated further and we sat inside planning our chance to return. Foolishly I went with him on a cold full-moon phase, when the wind had been in the south for too many days and the sea was calm and clear. We caught very little. The snapper were all suffering from hypothermia.

I did notice, though, that the kina we collected for berley were crammed full of creamy peach-coloured roe, and the few fish we did find absolutely relished the floating chunks of kina eggs that drifted down towards them. We made a mental note to come back to the rocks after the coast had had some onshore winds and the moon had progressed to a more favourable phase.

Naturally enough Josh found the time to go, and this old fellow didn't. The result was more bags of beautiful snapper for Josh, all of them well fattened on a diet of kina. Then Nik Mathiesen texted and said big snapper were going off in the Far North as well, and again, they were all fat on kina.

The coincidence seemed too real to rub off: the big snapper had just started fishing well on the coast, despite the plunge in water temperature, and the kina had just suddenly come into condition as well. I had never really contemplated what might drive that late autumn and early winter snapper run. It looked as if the fatness and the quality of the kina roes were playing an important part.

Initially I thought this would be directly related to the kina-spawning season, but found that possibly the inverse was true. Kina spawn during the warmer months, from November through to March, but like pacific oysters, their roes can be in their best condition during the cooler months. This is because their gonads are also used as organs in which to store energy. So a kina that is not spawning may well be 'fatter' than one that is.

It suggested that the snapper were in tune with the kina's condition and could probably tell when their gonads were plump and fat.

Kina are hard work for snapper to open, and only larger specimens have the necessary power in their jaws. Skinny kina are simply not worth the effort. Fat kina make it all worthwhile. Kina condition could easily be influencing the quality of the snapper fishing around the rocks.

Next year, during another dark decent into winter, I'll be monitoring the condition of those kina gonads closely.

Snapper go wild at Poor Knights

The Poor Knights Island's Marine Reserve is an interesting experiment.

Some would call it a return of the islands to their natural state. It's not of course. Some apex predators do seem to have increased in abundance - mainly bronze whaler sharks - but there has also been a corresponding increase of bronze whaler sharks in unprotected areas on the coast as well. The fish populations currently present in the marine reserve represent the unnatural removal of the principal apex predator (namely humans) from one isolated and well-defined area. The result is a disparity in fish populations that wouldn't normally occur.

Most obvious are the huge hordes of snapper that now populate the reserve. Their numbers are at an all-time historical high. With few predators to make any real dent in their population, the total biomass of adult snapper within the reserve can only get larger and larger.

The competition for food amongst these big snapper will become intense. Already congregations of big snapper follow along behind tourist divers waiting for them to knock food items out of the kelp or accidentally turn over a rock (feeding fish is banned at the reserve).

Not satisfied with these meager pickings, the biggest snapper have turned predatory, killing and eating large reef fish that, in recent decades, have had few real enemies. One group of snapper was witnessed herding up a group of pink maomao, with one large pink maomao being 'taken out' by the largest snapper. The resulting piranha-like feeding frenzy was photographed underwater.

The implications are that big snapper will become the dominant apex predator of the reef environment at the Poor Knights, with roving gangs of big, knobbly-faced snapper hunting down cowering reef fish wherever they can. It will make quite a sight: a marine reserve full to overflowing with big snapper bullies. Anyone diving there in the future might be well advised to keep their fingers clenched into fists and their hands close by their sides.?

	This article is reproduced with permission of New Zealand Fishing News October 2008 - written by Craig Worthington RE-PUBLISHING ELSEWHERE IS PROHIBITED