TPW TV: Sea Grass and Flats Boats
Monday, June 11th, 2012
This is Passport to Texas
If you’re headed to the coast this summer with your flats boat, watch the Texas Parks and Wildlife PBS Television series in June for a segment to help keep you from damaging sea grass with your motor’s propeller. Series producer, Don Cash:
62—A flats boat is a very shallow boat that you use in very shallow water. But there are some things that you need to know before you take your flats boat out there.
Run deep fish shallow. That’s the way the people fished here fifty years ago, and everybody respected the shallow flats until flats boats came in.
There are sea grasses all up and down the Texas coast, and they’re very important as an estuary, a breeding ground, for shrimp, fin fish, and all kinds of other things.
If you look really closely through here you’ll see there are lots of juvenile and baby shrimp, juvenile pin fish and lots of juvenile croaker. They’re a food source for a variety of organisms that live in the bay.
Summer’s a great time to go out and go fishing, especially out on the coast. But, take care of the environment and learn a little bit about what you need to do.
If we don’t find creative management strategies, these sea grasses will disappear and the great fishing will disappear with it. That’s the bottom line.
The title of the story is A Scar on the Flats. It airs on the PBS stations here in Texas the week of June 10th through the 16th, and you can also see it on our YouTube Channel.
Thanks Don.
The Wild.ife and Sport Fish Restoration program supports our series and funds conservation projects in Texas.
For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.
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