Holy Mackerel, Where’d You Go? (Hakai Magazine)
Summer in Atlantic Canada can be an unreliable thing, emerging reluctantly from the damp cold of spring. But a sure sign of summer’s arrival is the sudden presence of Atlantic mackerel, which first appear as the trees are becoming flush with leaves in May, and depart with the coming of cool temperatures in the fall, schooling in enormous numbers on their migration up and down the coast. Along the way, they’re often plucked from the water, with some ending up in cases on a wharf in downtown Yarmouth, a small town on the southern tip of Nova Scotia, where in July 2021 volunteers for Seafest are unloading those cases in preparation for one of the fishing festival’s most incongruously popular events: the 12th-annual mackerel toss.
As he watches preparations from behind the line of sawhorses meant to contain spectators, Dave Warner, Seafest’s former president, explains that mackerel are a logical choice for the event. They’re a local fish that often turns up on fishing lines and in frying pans in the community, but they can also be experienced as something else entirely: a slippery, hand-sized projectile for a competitor to chuck in batches of 15 as their teammate attempts to catch the fish in a plastic bucket held in outstretched arms. As the competition begins, pairs line up at either end of the wharf, two teams at a time; the first toss of the event unspools a scream from the seagulls hovering overhead, and soon, the wharf is littered with the results of throws too short or too wide, as the fish fly out of people’s grasp.
“It’s not like throwing beanbags,” Warner says with a chuckle.
As far as fish carnage goes, the mackerel toss is pretty minimal—the competition runs through five cases of a few dozen fish each, acquired by donation from a local commercial fishing outfit—but the act of hurling mackerel by the fistful nonetheless gives an impression of almost infinite bounty. For anglers, the experience is much the same: drop a line of hooks in the water in the summer, and you’ll soon be hauling in a string of mackerel, like bunting celebrating the season.
Yet, despite how things look at the water’s edge, scientists say mackerel are undeniably on the decline; a 2021 assessment by Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) found that spawning-age stock was at the lowest level ever recorded, prompting a flurry of management measures, from a 50 percent reduction in quota for commercial harvesters to a catch limit on the recreational fishery—a first for a fishery that once had no maximum catch.
For some, these changes have been hard to accept, not least because the behavior of mackerel belies their downward trajectory; as their numbers shrink, they cluster together more, creating the impression that the fish are as plentiful as ever. But the bigger adjustment may be cultural, in a region where mackerel’s abundance is woven into the fabric of everyday life, from a summertime ritual shared within families and a food distributed to elders in Indigenous communities to a source of bait for fishers supplying their own lobster and crab traps, not to mention the basis of a commercial fishery spread across the four Atlantic provinces and Quebec. Now, as mackerel populations dwindle, a fish once taken for granted has stepped into a complicated spotlight, with people wondering if their decline can be reversed, or if—as once-abundant species like the Atlantic cod have done before them—mackerel will slip away for good.