IS THE SOUTH ATLANTIC RED SNAPPER POPULATION REALLY "LARGER THAN ANY PERSON ALIVE HAS EVER SEEN?"

 

Political debates can become intense, and there’s always a point, no matter who is involved, when the truth tends to get stretched beyond the point of recognition.

When the debate involves saltwater fisheries management, and the various angler advocacy organizations get involved, the standards for “truth” always seem to be set just a bit lower, and the stretching and distortion seem to get a bit worse.  Toss in the sort of politicians who are regularly associated with “alternative facts” and you can pretty well picture how things will turn out.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have written about the recreational red snapper fishery in the South Atlantic, and about how “anglers’ rights” groups like the Coastal Conservation Association and angling industry groups like the American Sportfishing Association and the Center for Sportfishing Policy have tried to overrule the professional fishery managers at the National Marine Fisheries Service in order to expand the South Atlantic’s recreational red snapper season and increase the recreational red snapper kill, by appealing to politicians like Florida’s Governor Ron Desantis, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and others close to President Donald Trump.  And I have written about how a federal district court judge in the District of Columbia has issued a temporary injunction, halting any fishing under the exempted fishing permits issued by NMFS that would have allowed the extended season, because their issuance was clearly illegal under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.

I thought that, with the temporary injunction issued, I’d move away from South Atlantic red snapper for a while, and take a look at other fisheries issues elsewhere on the coast.  But just last Friday, a friend down in Maryland, who is also heavily involved in fisheries conservation matters, sent me a new research report that was too relevant to leave unreported, because it directly addresses one of the most-repeated assertions made by those trying to overturn federal red snapper management in the South Atlantic, and one of the greatest underpinnings of the argument to increase landings.

The Coastal Conservation Association made that assertion in a November, 2025 press release:

“the [South Atlantic red snapper] population [is] larger than any person alive has ever seen.”

 But there’s pretty strong evidence that’s just not true.

The report that my friend sent me was titled “Relative abundance of select reef fishes from Southeast Reef Fish Survey video data, 2011-2025.”  As the report itself explains,

“Reef fish species along the southeast United States Atlantic coast (hereafter, SEUS) have been monitored by the Marine Resources Monitoring, Assessment, and Prediction program (MARMAP) and the Southeast Reef Fish Survey (SERFS) with chevron traps since 1990.  These trap data have been central components of the stock assessments of many various fish species in the SEUS, and trap indices for a number of species have been summarized annually by the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources.  Beginning in 2011, video cameras were attached to all traps deployed region-wide by SERFS to provide additional information about reef fish relative abundance and seafloor habitat.  The goal of this report is to provide video-based indices of abundance for many reef fish species in the SEUS, which complements the summary of trap-based indices of abundance…  [citation omitted]”

One of the species included in the video data is Atlantic red snapper, with the data collected at numerous sites that extend from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina to about halfway down the eastern coast of the Florida peninsula, and out to 100 meters (roughly 330 feet) of water. 

A graph summarizing the data collected between the start of the video survey in 2011 and the last complete year of data, 2025, looks like this:

 

The trajectory of the curve certainly doesn’t make it appear that “the [South Atlantic red snapper] population [was] larger than any person alive has ever seen” in 2025.  In fact, that graph makes it appear as if South Atlantic red snapper abundance might have peaked in 2022, and has been steadily sliding downhill ever since, so that in 2025, it was at its lowest level since 2016.

And, if that trajectory continues, abundance could decline even more this year.

Of course, the video data comes with some warnings.  The report advises, among other things, that

“Video-based indices of abundance are not an indication of stock status, the latter of which requires additional information such [as] landings, length and age composition, and life history parameters,”

and

“The ways in which video-based indices of abundance are standardized in this report (e.g., model selection, predictor variables included) may be different from those used in SEDAR stock assessments.”

So the above graph, constructed around such video-based indices, doesn’t tell us anything about whether the South Atlantic red snapper stock is healthy or at risk of becoming overfished—or whether it has become overfished already.  That’s up to the folks doing the stock assessments to decide, and we’ll find out what they’re thinking when SEDAR 90 is released sometime early next year.

But what the above graph can tell us is the trend in red snapper abundance, and it clearly shows that the South Atlantic red snapper video-based abundance index has declined by 30% or so between 2022 and 2025, and that such declining trend may well be continuing.

So no, we probably don’t currently have a larger South Atlantic red snapper population “than any person alive has ever seen,” if only because most people alive are more than three years old—even if some of the folks trying to extend the recreational red snapper season seem to reason like three-year-olds much of the time.

Still, it’s easy to argue that the video-based index is only one indicator of South Atlantic red snapper abundance, and that other indicators may reach other conclusions.  Thus, it’s only logical to turn to another recently-published report, “Reef fish trends in relative abundance from a fishery-independent survey in waters off the southeastern United States,” which uses data generated from the Southeast Reef Fish Chevron Trap Survey, as conducted during the years 1990-2019 and 2021-2025. 

That report provides a 35-year time series (interrupted only in 2020 due to the COVID 19 pandemic) of relative abundance of multiple species, including Atlantic red snapper, and provides a reliable baseline against which to gauge current red snapper abundance.  The underlying survey is deemed “fishery-independent” data, meaning that its data is collected solely by researchers, without any reference to catch or landings by the commercial or recreational fisheries.  That is a very important consideration for the tightly-regulated South Atlantic red snapper, as

“Fishery-dependent (FD) measures of abundance, such as fishery landings, are affected by management actions and industry practices, making it difficult to separate population level responses from changes in fishery behavior and management actions in FD data.  Fishery-independent (FI) data are collected in a way that is independent of regulations such as minimum size limits, seasons, and quotas imposed on industries for managed species.  When fisheries are highly regulated, FI surveys often become the only method available to adequately characterize population size, age and length compositions, and reproductive parameters, all of which are needed to access the status of stocks.  The use of adequate FI data also decreases assessment uncertainty over FD information alone.”

The Chevron Trap Survey is conducted at multiple locations between Cape Hatteras and St. Lucie Inlet, Florida.  It has also generated a relative abundance index of Atlantic red snapper, based on the number of fish caught in the chevron traps.  A graph of that index, depicting relative abundance between 1990 and 2025, looks like this:

 

It’s not exactly the same curve that we see for the video-based index, but once again, we see the highest relative abundance—presumably coinciding with the population’s peak—in 2023 (based on the point estimate) or 2018 (the peak of the normalized curve), and then a steep decline in relative abundance in the past few years, to levels last seen in 2015 (based on the normalized curve) or 2014 (based on the point estimate). 

Either way, the chevron trap data seems to confirm that the South Atlantic red snapper population in 2025 was not larger “than any person alive has ever seen,” and given the steepness of the decline, it isn’t unreasonable to assume that abundance will be even lower in 2026—and very possibly beyond.

That trend strongly suggests that 2026 is probably the wrong time to provide anglers a longer season, that will almost certainly lead to them overfishing the red snapper resource.

Those arguing for a longer recreational red snapper season might try to argue that, because the video cameras are mounted on chevron traps, that the two indices of abundance are measuring the same thing, and so are not really different surveys.  However, the scientists who produced the last South Atlantic red snapper stock assessment in 2021 disagree:

“The working group recommended dome-shaped selectivity for the chevron trap index and flat-topped selectivity for the video index.  Those recommendations were adopted in the assessment, and the two indices were input as separate time series.”

What that means is that the two indices measure the abundance of different age classes of fish.  The chevron traps tend to capture a few age classes of fish (generally, fish less than 600mm—about 24 inches—long and perhaps four years old), and under-sample older and larger fish.  The video cameras, on the other hand, probably miss some of the older/younger fish, but once snapper grow large enough to be readily detected in the videos, continue to provide good samples of fish throughout the older/larger age classes, although their ability to determine the precise size and age of fish more than ten years old may be questionable.

So, when both the chevron trap index and the video-based index show a sharp decline in South Atlantic red snapper numbers, that suggests that the decline might be occurring in multiple age/size classes.

That could be significant, because the 2021 stock assessment informs us that

“Total estimated abundance was…at its highest level at the end of the time series, comparable to estimates in the 1950s and 1960s, but with a more truncated age structure…The highest recruitment values were predicted to have occurred in the mid-1960s, 2006-2008, and in the terminal six years of the assessment (2014-2019).”

All of that is consistent with the pattern shown in both graphs of relative abundance, with South Atlantic red snapper abundance rising rapidly after 2014, when a period of high recruitment began, and peaking right around the time that the stock assessment was released.  While that recent high abundance might not actually have been higher “than any person alive has ever seen,” since it was “comparable to estimates in the 1950s and 1960s,” and plenty of folks alive today, including myself, were alive to see things back then, it was still a very solid level of abundance.  However, the late 2010s South Atlantic red snapper population differed from that of the 1950s and 1960s in one critical respect:  It had “a more truncated age structure,” and age structure has a major impact on the fecundity of the stock.

The stock assessment states that

“Spawning stock biomass is modeled as population fecundity (number of eggs).”

So even though South Atlantic red snapper abundance, measured in numbers of fish, might have been about as high in 2019 as it was in the 1950s and 1960s, because the age/size structure of the population was truncated, and the current population made up mostly of younger, smaller fish, by some of the most critical measures, including biomass and, most importantly, the number of eggs produced, the population remaines at relatively low and arguably unsustainable levels, as the two graphs below show.

 

Given those facts, the claim that “the [South Atlantic red snapper] population [is] larger than any person alive has ever seen” becomes essentially meaningless, even if it were true, because abundance alone doesn’t tell the whole story.

Still, if the graphs correctly captured the increase in red snapper abundance leading up to the last stock assessment, there’s no reason to believe that they didn’t also accurately capture an abundance decline in the years since, so the claim about the largest population anyone alive has ever seen is most probably wrong.

Even so, the proponents of a larger South Atlantic recreational red snapper kill aren’t likely to go away quietly.  They will argue that “the science is bad,” and try to obfuscate the truth by attacking the video and chevron trap data, while referencing other studies that suggest that the South Atlantic red snapper population is larger than the stock assessment reveals.

But this is when red snapper become red herrings.

Because, when assessing fish stocks, absolute population abundance is less important than population trends.  The models used to assess stocks can change, certain data previously used may be excluded from future data runs, and new data streams may be added.  Assumptions about natural mortality and the survival of released fish may change.  And when that happens, the estimate of total abundance—both present and past—may change as well, even though the status of the stock remains the same.

But even when model and/or some of the underlying assumptions change the estimates of spawning stock biomass, the trends in biomass and fish abundance generally remain close to the same.  Regardless of the models used, a declining trend ought to be cause for concern.

The plain truth is that we don’t know, with any certainty, how many red snapper were swimming off the South Atlantic coast in the mid-1950s, when the population reached a peak.  We don’t know how many were swimming around during the lows of the 1990s, during the recent highs of the late 2010s or, for that matter, how many are swimming around today.  The best we can do is review the data and provide a reasonable estimate.

But what we do know is that at least two long-term indices of abundance are showing that there are fewer red snapper swimming off the South Atlantic today than there were even four years ago.

And that means that when someone tells you that “the [South Atlantic red snapper] population [is] larger than any person alive has ever seen,” they are also probably telling you a very intentional lie.