GULF OF MEXICO RED SNAPPER: ARE STATES SETTING THEMSELVES UP TO FAIL?

 

Gulf of Mexico red snapper, like Atlantic menhaden and some other coastal species, have become what I call “political fish;” that is, species that has seen stakeholder rhetoric become so heated that those driving the debate set aside science and reason, and instead treat their opinions like fact, and try to convince professional managers to do the same.

In such cases, data is ignored or distorted, ideology is substituted for truth, and policy becomes whatever those with the greatest political pull thinks it ought to be.  In the case of Gulf of Mexico red snapper, the recreational fishing tackle industry and its “anglers’ rights” affiliates have spent significant time and effort trying to convince all concerned that

“By any metric, state management [of Gulf red snapper]…has been a resounding success, with better data, longer seasons, and higher angler satisfaction.  All while the snapper population continues to rebound at greater than expected rates.”

But is any of that really true?

There’s little doubt that, because of recreational advocates' pressure and political connections, fishing seasons are longer.  

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently announced that the 2025 Gulf recreational red snapper season will run for 126 days, which is the longest season that Florida anglers have enjoyed in many years.  

Louisiana issued emergency regulations to open its recreational season on April 15, 15 days ahead of the scheduled opening day of May 1.  

And in Alabama, where red snapper angling had only been permitted during four-day “weekends” throughout the season, regulators are now going to allow anglers to fish on all seven days of the week from the season opener on May 23 through June 30, at which point fishing will again be restricted to four-day weekends until Alabama’s 2025 recreational red snapper quota is exhausted.

And, at least to the extent that seasons are longer and allow recreational fishermen to put more dead snapper on the dock, there’s little doubt that angler satisfaction is trending higher, too.

But whether the states actually provide “better data,” and whether the red snapper population is currently rebounding at all, much less “at greater than expected rates,” are more than a little debatable.

I have a friend down in the Gulf who has operated a charter boat for many years.  He remembers when the red snapper population was close to its nadir, experienced the start of its recovery, and enjoyed a few years of notably increased abundance.  Now, he’s very afraid that the population is headed the other way, largely due to state fisheries managers finding ways to take too many fish out of the population.

I won’t mention his name—he doesn’t need unasked-for publicity—but he recently sent me an email that expressed his concerns.

“We are all seeing the end of sustainability in the gulf on the horizon.

“Louisiana federal charter boats who never wanted to be sector separated are now wanting to explore being state managed.  This is because Louisiana set their red snapper season to open in April at a 4 fish bag limit for private anglers and state guide boats.  The state guides and state managers are basically rubbing the disparity in the faces of federal permitted charters [who must fish under more restrictive rules]…

“Alabama is going to open its red snapper season the Friday before Memorial Day…but because they can’t catch their [recreational annual catch limit] they are going to [allow red snapper fishing] 7 days a week until the end of June…

“The state members of the [Gulf Fishery Management] Council are pushing toward trying to not have to pay back any overages if they blow their quota.

“What is apparent is the average landed weight of red snapper caught in the gulf continues to plummet…State directors believe all is fine and think the red snapper stock is sustainable.

“What we see is, localized depletion is worrisome.  It is now generalized depletion…In essence, we have an abundance of 1.75 to 2 year old red snapper, but very few 3 to 12 year old year classes.  We all are harvesting fish at a rate that is faster than they can reproduce and populate the reefs.”

My friend is not alone in his concerns.  There are folks in the business who believe that current fishing regulations may be too much of a good thing, and that seasons are running longer than they ought if the fishery is to remain sustainable.

Last year, after Florida’s recreational red snapper season had closed, some local charter boat captains weren’t particularly happy with how things panned out.  Destin, Florida arguably sits at the heart of Florida’s Gulf Coast red snapper fishery.  A September 3, 2024 article in a local publication, The Destin Log, reported that

“For some, it was business as usual.  But most all agree the red snapper season was a bit long…

“The 88-day season (about 3 months) was the longest in more than a decade.”

The paper went on to report that one charter boat operator

“said snapper fishing was ‘tough,’ and he would like to see it end Aug. 1 in the future.

“’This long season is going to make next year even tougher.’ [he] said.”

Another Destin-based captain observed that, in 2024,

“The snapper fishing was by far the toughest snapper season I’ve ever fished.  They were tough from the get-go, and became almost non-existent at the end of the season.

“The numbers just weren’t there this year, and it was a little scary to see.

”I believe the long season, even though it is good for business, is not good for the fishery.  I hope they make a change.”

While a third captain noted that

“We were able to find snappers throughout the season, but it wasn’t necessarily easy and for sure the overall size average was smaller than I’d like.”

Yet instead of shortening the Florida season, and ending it around August 1^st in order to take some pressure off the heavily-fished species, the state recently announced that the 2025 recreational red snapper season will be nearly 50% longer than it was in 2024.  If Florida's 88-day 2024 season was, as the charter boat captain maintained, likely to make 2025 red snapper fishing “even tougher” than it was in 2024, we can only imagine the impact that 2025’s 126-day season will have on recreational red snapper fishing in 2026.

Farther to the west, in Orange Beach, Alabama, a charter boat captain advises clients that,

“A half day trip during the beginning of June, the first month of red snapper season you may catch a mess, if you work hard and everyone participates (and the fish cooperate).  However, if you come during the second week of June or during July or August, you may catch a few for dinner.  You will catch a lot of smaller fish, but they will likely be too small to harvest.  This is due in part to too much fishing pressure in the areas close to shore.”

Based on all of the captains’ comments, it seems to make little sense to increase the seasons and bag limits yet, due to the pressure they're getting from the anglers' rights crowd, that seems to be the direction most state managers are taking.

A lot of the problem lies in the fact that, despite the claims that states are providing “better data,” the data used to gauge each state’s red snapper landings is problematic, with regard to both accuracy and how it is used.

For many years, recreational red snapper landings in the four Gulf states—Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana—were estimated solely by the National Marine Fisheries Service, which first employed the admittedly problematic Marine Recreational Fisheries Statistics Survey and, beginning in 2017, switched over to the Marine Recreational Information Program (Texas had long employed an archaic data collection system that predated the MRFSS, and was incompatible with any other state or federal data collection system).  Both federal programs incorporated a significant time lag, as their catch, landings, and effort estimates were not produced until, at best, 45 days after the end of each of the two-month-long “waves” in which data was collected.  That didn’t work well when federal snapper seasons might run for a period of only a few weeks or, in some years, only a few days.

So all five states began working with NMFS to develop their own data collection systems that could be used to collect information on a more timely basis.  The states’ efforts became more urgent after the Gulf Council began to consider Amendment 50 to the Fishery Management Plan for the Reef Fish Resources of the Gulf of Mexico, which allocated a portion of the recreational red snapper quota to each state, but allowed the states to set fishing seasons and, within strict limitations, size and bag limits that best suited each state’s red snapper anglers, so long as such rules constrained the state’s red snapper landings to or below the state quota.

The problem was, and to some extent still is, that each state’s data collection program differs from all of the others, and from the federal program, in its methodology.  That creates a problem.  As NMFS has explained,

“The current red snapper catch limits…are based, in part, on private-angling landings estimated using the Federal data-collection system, and NMFS uses the estimates from the Federal survey to determine whether landings exceed the total recreational [annual catch limit] (quota) and the stock [overfishing limit].  However, each Gulf state manages the harvest by its private anglers using estimates from its own state data collection program.  The Federal Marine Recreational Information Program (MRIP) based catch limits for Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana are not directly comparable to the landings estimates generated by each of those states, and the state estimates are not directly comparable to each other.  In other words, each state is estimating in a different ‘currency.’  Therefore…NMFS…worked with the Gulf States to develop calibration ratios so that each state’s catch limit could be converted to the Federal ‘currency’ to the currency in which each state monitors landings.”

An initial analysis demonstrated that while some states’ landings estimates were reasonably close to those of NMFS, other states severely undercounted their anglers harvest.  To level the playing field, Mississippi’s and Alabama’s federal recreational red snapper allocations had to be multiplied by factors of 0.3840 and 0.4875, respectively, which substantially reduced the number of fish that anglers in those states could land.  Texas’ quota required no adjustment at all, while Florida’s and Louisiana’s were adjusted very slightly upward. 

Subsequent analysis revised the adjustments, so that Alabama’s and Mississippi’s reductions from the federal quota are not quite as substantial as they originally were, with the federal quota now multiplied by 0.548 and 0.503, respectively.  Florida anglers are allowed to catch more red snapper than they were before, after a new regulation called for their federal quota to be multiplied by a factor of 1.34.   

Such adjustments suggest that the calibration process remains a work in progress, and that further refinements might yet need to be done to assure that state regulations don’t inadvertently lead to overfishing.

  It’s also important to note that, before the calibration process went into effect, private-boat recreational fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico overfished their red snapper quota by as much as 2 million pounds in both 2018 and 2019, but were not held accountable for their overages because the lack of calibration made it appear that they had not overfished.  To the extent that the calibration ratios currently being used don’t accurately capture the differences between state and federal data, and to the extent that the state data collection systems, which largely depend on anglers accurately and faithfully reporting their red snapper catch, suffer from angler underreporting, recreational overfishing may still be occurring today, although hopefully at lower levels.

The other problem is that no one really knows the status of the Gulf red snapper stock.  The assumption, based on past stock assessments, is that it is no longer overfished and not experiencing overfishing, but since the last, comprehensive “benchmark” stock assessment failed to pass peer review, it is not safe to assume that the stock remains healthy.

While we may hope that the stock is healthy and will continue to rebuild, the anecdotal evidence suggests that there may be problems ahead. 

For when fish become harder to find, when the average size of the fish caught starts to fall, and when fishermen find nearby fishing grounds quickly depleted, and are forced to run ever farther to locate the size and abundance of fish that they once caught much closer to home, its likely that bad news is not too far away.