CORTEZ – A visit by Dr. Angela Collins to the Cortez Cultural Center furthered the organization’s mission to “preserve the past and protect the future.”
The University of Florida Sea Grant marine extension agent told visitors last Thursday all about mullet, the reason Cortez was founded in the late 1880s, and still its most profitable crop.
Fisheries are part of Florida’s second-largest economic driver, agriculture, Collins told a group of about 25 visitors, many of them tourists, supporting the state’s largest industry.
Collins quizzed visitors about why mullet jump. It could be to rid themselves of parasites, or because they like it, people ventured. Scientifically, no answer has been discovered, but scientists have learned that when you see a fish jump in Florida, nine times out of 10, it’s a mullet, she said.
The fish can live to be 13 years old, are scavengers, and it’s tough to catch them with hook and line.
As a result, ancient tribes in Florida used gill nets to catch the fish, using coconuts as floats and shells to weigh them down, and herding them into dead-end canals to have fresh fish close at hand, Collins said.
Cuban fishermen traveled to Cortez to catch mullet, especially during Lent in February and March, when demand was particularly high since many Catholics eat fish on Fridays in Lent when other meat is forbidden.
In the late 1960s, the mullet fishery shifted more to roe – fish eggs – than the fish itself, due to the high prices it brought in foreign markets. Mullet became known as “Gulf of Mexico gold,” Collins said.
“Sailfish is the state fish of Florida,” she said. “It should be mullet.”
Gill nets continued to be used until 1995, when voters passed a state Constitutional Amendment banning them, believing mullet fishing was depleting mullet and other bycatch species caught in mullet nets. Mullet fishermen now rely on different types of smaller nets, she said.
Cortez is special, Collins said, with its status on the National Register of Historic Places, its 95-acre FISH Preserve on Sarasota Bay and some descendants of original settlers from Carteret County, North Carolina still living in the village.
As a working waterfront on very valuable Florida property, Collins said, “There is no place left like Cortez in Florida.”
