RED SNAPPER DEBATE HEATS UP IN THE SOUTH ATLANTIC

 

These days, when someone hears that recreational fishermen are whining about red snapper rules, they probably assume that such fishermen are in the Gulf of Mexico, where various recreational fishing organizations have been carrying out a loud, chaotic and largely dishonest fight against the National Marine Fisheries Service for a decade or more.

What folks might not realize is that the first unpleasant skirmishes over red snapper occurred not in the Gulf, but in the South Atlantic—primarily off Florida, but off the other states, too—after biologists revealed that the red snapper spawning stock had fallen to historically low levels, and NMFS decided to do something about it.

It all began after an assessment of the South Atlantic red snapper stock, completed in 2008 and revised a year later, declared that

“This assessment indicates that the stock has been overfished since 1960 and overfishing is currently occurring.”

The assessment also advised that

“The bulk of the landings of red snapper come from the recreational fishery, which have exceeded the landings of the commercial fishery by 2-3 fold over the assessment period.”

At the time, recreational red snapper fishermen were already limited to two fish per day, which had to be at least 20 inches long.  Any management response was inevitably going to lead to more restrictive regulations.  Still, it was very clear that more restrictive regulations were needed, for as the 2008 stock assessment explained,

“The fishing mortality (F) is compared to what the fishing mortality would be if the fishery were operating at the proxy level for maximum fishing (F_40%).  The ratio F/F_40% suggests a generally increasing trend from the 1950s through the mid-1990s, and since 1985 has fluctuated about a mean near 14.  This indicates that overfishing has been occurring since 1960 at about 14 times the sustainable level, with the 2006 estimate of F/F_40% at 12.021.  [emphasis added]”

When fishing mortality is 12 or 14 times the sustainable level, and when recreational landings are twice or three times those of the commercial fleet, it is pretty certain that anglers are going to experience some extremely restrictive regulations in order to get their landings back down to sustainable levels.

And it’s also pretty certain that they’re not going to like it, and will probably resist such restrictions being adopted.

Still, with red snapper spawning stock biomass at just 2.5% of its target level, it was pretty clear that the status quo could not be maintained.

The first step in the process was a new stock assessment, that was released in October 2010.  The 2010 assessment confirmed that the South Atlantic red snapper stock was overfished and experiencing overfishing, although it also suggested that things weren’t quite as bad as the 2008 assessment portrayed.  Fishing mortality for the period 2007-2009 was only a little over four times the sustainable level, while spawning stock biomass was 9% of the target.

The poor condition of the South Atlantic red snapper stock led to a rebuildng plan, and also to a quiet fight between NMFS and parts of the recreational community, which didn’t get too much publicity outside of the immediate area.  It also set the tone for recreational fishing advocacy in the Gulf of Mexico, and elsewhere on the coast.

The rerbuilding plan that was ultimately adopted prohibited red snapper harvest in 2010 and 2011 (and again in 2015 and 2016), and led to very short seasons—often less than a week—was adopted for the other years.  As a result of those and other actions, the stock was expected to recover by 2044.

Once the plan was adopted, the red snapper debate in the South Atlantic quieted down, while a new and more heated fight erupted in the Gulf.

But now, after nearly a decade of relative quiet, the South Atlantic is heating up again.

The trigger for the new activity was a stock assessment update released in March 2021.  While it indicated that the status of the stock had improved since 2010, South Atlantic red snapper were still overfished and still experiencing overfishing.

It was clear that some additional harvest restrictions were needed to get overfishing under control, but adopting effective regulations would be difficult, because many of the red snapper killed by anglers represent discard mortality; that is, fish that die after being released during the closed season, by anglers targeting other species.  Still, a dead fish is still a dead fish, and a snapper that dies after release causes as much harm to the stock as one intentionally caught and landed.  Thus, to help account for the discards, the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council, meeting earlier this month, dropped the commercial quota from 124,815 to 77,016 pounds, while also reducing the recreational harvest limit from 29,656 to 19,119 fish.

Originally, the South Atlantic Council was also considering closing about 5,000 square miles of ocean between the 15- and 40-fathom countours, stretching from Brunswick, Georgia south to Melbourne, Florida, but ultimately decided against such action.

Even so, just the threat of such closure got politicians involved, and having politicians attempting to legislate the details of fishery management is almost never a good thing if you want fish stocks to thrive. 

Two members of Congress, Rep. John Rutherford (R-FL) and Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-FL), along with 14 other House members, introduced legislation called the Red Snapper Act, H.R. 9373, which would prohibit NMFS from closing any area in the South Atlantic to snapper or grouper fishing until the conclusion of something being called “The Great South Atlantic Red Snapper Count,” a survey of the red snapper population off the southeast coast that emulates the so-called “Great Red Snapper Count” conducted in the Gulf of Mexico.

Like its predecessor in the Gulf, the South Atlantic red snapper count, funded by legislation also introduced by Reps. Rutherford and Murphy, will involve a number of different sampling techniques, which its supporters hope will demonstrate that the red snapper population is larger than NMFS believes, and can support higher recreational landings.

  The fact that at least one news source, The [St. Augustine, FL] Recorder, reported that

“The Red Snapper Act has been endorsed by the Center for Sportfishing Policy, the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation, the Coastal Conservation Association and the American Sportfishing Association,”

suggests the motivation behind such legislation, as all four groups have been at the forefront of efforts to impugn and undermine federal red snapper management in the Gulf of Mexico.

Even the rhetoric associated with the Red Snapper Act, such as Rep. Rutherford’s statement that

“For too long, Florida’s anglers have been forced to put up with bad science and short red snapper seasons…Florida anglers deserve dependable access to red snapper fishing now and in years to come,”

is reminiscent of the sort of misleading—for there have been no rigorous studies suggesting that NMFS’ current science is, in fact, “bad”—comments that such organizations have made with respect to Gulf red snapper management over the past decade.

Equally reminiscent is the deceptive comment made by Gary Jennings of the American Sportfishing Association, a trade group representing the fishing tackle industry.  He acknowledged the need to reduce red snapper discard mortality but said that

“snapper-grouper closures aren’t the way to get there with a stock that by all measures is historically abundant and rebounded at such an astonishing rate.”

Jennings never even tried to explain how an overfished stock could be deemed “historically abundant,"  Nor did he mention that the seeming rebound in the stock is due, in part, to managers moving the rebuilding goalposts.  Although they were scientifically justified in doing so, they nonetheless reduced the biomass target to a 30% spawning potential ratio, rather than the 40% of a decade ago.  Reducing the biomass target will always make rebuilding an easier thing to do.

So yes, a lot of the ills of the Gulf red snapper debate are coming to plague the South Atlantic.

Another thing that may be coming to the South Atlantic is the use of exempted fishing permits that allow federal rules to be set aside under certain specified conditions.  It’s not clear what such permits might be used for in the South Atlantic fishery; in the Gulf, they allowed states to set their own recreational red snapper seasons, so long as such seasons constrained catch to the overall recreational harvest limit established by NMFS.  

However, even though Gulf anglers may land millions of pounds of red snapper each year, the state seasons originally ushered in by exempted fishing permits led to severe overfishing and new sources of controversy.  Given the tiny red snapper harvest in the South Atlantic, it’s hard to believe that such permits would be worth the trouble that they would likely cause.

Yet, whether the folks involved with the South Atlantic red snapper fishery want trouble or not, it looks as if they might find it.  There are plenty of signs that the same folks who fought against needed management measures in the fishery over a decade ago, and who have perfected their disruptive approach in the Gulf, are growing more active in the South Atlantic once again.

Making trouble is, unfortunately, something that they do very well.