TRUTH, THE FIRST CASUALTY: SOUTH ATLANTIC RED SNAPPER

 

Some have said that

“Truth is the first casualty of war,”

and that statement is as true of political battles over natural resources and it is of military conflicts.

And over the last couple of decades, along the southeastern coast—both the Gulf and the South Atlantic—there is probably no fish that has been a greater focus of political battles than the red snapper.

I’m not sure why that is.

I’ve caught the things, and they’re fun to catch, but nothing exceptional.  Amberjack pull a lot harder, and sails are quite a bit more fun.  I’ve eaten them, too, and the meat is OK, but in my view no better than yellowtail, mangroves, muttons, or some of the other fish I’ve caught off South Atlantic shores.

But for whatever reason, red snapper seem to be particularly good at inspiring fights, at least fights involving recreational fishermen, the recreational fishing industry, and just about everyone else, who the recreational folks repeatedly try to blame for the problems that they, themselves created.

The latest conflict has arisen over the National Marine Fisheries Service issuance of exempted fishing permits, that will allow red snapper anglers in Atlantic Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina enjoy fishing seasons 20 or 30 times longer than they were granted last year, and perhaps exceed their annual catch limit by as much as 2,000% or more, without suffering any consequences at all (outside of a possible decline in the red snapper population).

That latest conflict is where the truth about recreational red snapper fishing in the South Atlantic comes in.  Not just one truth, or two, but a few of them.

The first important truth is that there are a lot of red snapper in the South Atlantic.  Some big year classes have pushed up abundance, measured in numbers, although biomass is probably still significantly below what it was during the mid-20^th Century, because most of the fish are still relatively small.

The second is that anglers are catching lot of those red snapper.  As one typical recreational commenter noted on a charter boat’s Facebook page,

“giving REC guys two days [season] for a fish that there’s zero chance your [sic] not catching them, shit you probably going to burn a ton of gas money just to go throw away Red snapper all day.”

A third truth, as the above quotation’s “throw away” comment suggests, is that a lot of the South Atlantic red snapper caught by anglers aren’t being kept by anglers, due both to the 1-fish federal bag limit and the very short federal fishing season, which is open for a day or two and closed for the rest of the year.  Instead, all of those over-limit and out-of-season red snapper are returned to the water.

In that regard, it’s also true that anglers release a lot of red snapper, in absolute terms; over the past five years, 2021 through 2025, recreational fishermen in the South Atlantic released an estimated 2.2 millon red snapper every year.

But a very unfortunate truth is that many of the red snapper that anglers release don’t survive.  Release mortality occurs in a host of ways.  The simplest is that some fish simply die from the stress of being hooked and released; one study conducted off North Carolina, which employed descending devices to get the fish back down to the bottom quickly, found that almost 94% of red snapper hooded in the jaw survive, while nearly 88% of all deeper-hooked fish die.

Another study, just released this month, was conducted off northern Florida, and found that if red snapper were released on the surface, without the use of a descending device, barotrauma—the damaging effects of pressure changes experienced when the fish was reeled up from the bottom—would result in 46.8% of them dying after release; that study found that if a descending device was used, the release mortality rate fell to just 12.9% after six hours, and 29.0% after 48 hours had passed.

But even assuming that all of the anglers releasing red snapper employed descending devices—which is a vastly over-optimistic assumption—29.0% of 2.2 million red snapper is still a lot of dead fish.

Which leads us to the most unpleasant truth of all:  That recreational release mortality kills far more red snapper than either recreational or commercial harvest.  It probably makes up about 80% of all recreational red snapper fishing mortality.

And that truth is the biggest casualty of the current red snapper wars, both because some of the details are being twisted, and because the massive level of recreational red snapper discards is being completely ignored by recreational fishing advocates.

That is nothing new.

Consider, for example, a press release put out by the Coastal Conservation Association, perhaps the nation’s largest, and very likely its most militant, anglers’ rights organization, last September.  Announcing that “South Atlantic States Unveil Road Map to Snapper Management;” the substantive portion of that release stated,

“South Atlantic red snapper is currently managed by NOAA Fisheries through the South Atlantic Fisheries Management Council.  The fishery has come under intense scrutiny in recent years as recreational fishing seasons have been limited to one or two days—and often closed entirely—despite the population being larger than at any time in recorded history.  Draconian federal restrictions arise from high levels of uncertainty in recreational catch data collected by the federal government.

“In just the last four months, the governors of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina voiced their support for a shift to state-led management of red snapper in the South Atlantic in a joint letter to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick.  That was quickly followed by formal letters from congressional delegations from each of the three states reinforcing the call for reform…

“’This is an incredibly important step in the future of recreational red snapper management in the South Atlantic,’ said Ted Venker, vice president of conservation for Coastal Conservation Association.  ‘We are grateful to the South Atlantic states for taking on this added responsibility and for their commitment to bring rational, reliable data and management to this fishery.  As we have seen in the Gulf under this approach, we are confident that management outcomes will begin to align with the health of the resource and enhance anglers’ access to it.’

“The process in the South Atlantic is expected to follow roughly the same path as state management in the Gulf, with each state implementing and testing data collection programs through Exempted Fishing Permits…”

Nowhere is the reader told of the huge waste of red snapper—estimated at approximately 475,000 dead fish—that results from recreational fishermen releasing red snapper during the closed season. 

Instead of admitting to that incontrovertible fact, the Coastal Conservation Association tries to pull out its favorite canard, that the 1- and 2-day red snapper seasons were due to “high levels of uncertainty in recreational catch data collected by the federal government,” although that’s not even close to true; the percent standard error—the measure of uncertainty—in the release data (used to calculate release mortality) for four out of the last five years was well within the parameters for acceptable data.  Admittedly, the uncertainty in the landings data was high, but the actual recreational landings are an order of magnitude smaller than the number of red snapper tossed overboard to die by recreational fishermen. 

That’s the truth that the Coastal Conservation Association, the American Sportfishing Association, and all of the other advocates of the exempted fishing permits and extending the South Atlantic red snapper season are trying to sweep under the rug.

They try to pretend that anglers are somehow the victims of an incompetent or uncaring federal government, and hope that the public (because the federal government already knows) never figures out is that those 475,000 red snapper dumped and wasted by recreational fishermen represent more than 42 times the number of red snapper landed by the entire commercial fishery in the South Atlantic (102,951 pound commercial quota divided by an average 9.19 pounds per commercially-landed red snapper equals 11,203 fish landed commercially).

About the only time that the angling industry and anglers’ rights crowd even admitted to all the dead discards was in a May 22 press release issued by the American Sportfishing Association, after a federal district judge in the District of Columbia enjoined the so-called “pilot programs” associated with the South Atlantic red snapper exempted fishing permits.  And even then, the release presented things backward, saying that

“the recreational fishery in recent years has been limited to one- or two-day recreational harvest seasons, which has led to excessive discard mortality estimates,”

instead of presenting the unvarnished truth, which is that

“because it produces so many dead red snapper discards when the season is closed, the recreational fishery in recent years has had to be limited to one- or two-day recreational harvest seasons.”

And we should note that, when stating a truthful case, one normally states the cause before the effect instead of, as the ASA did, stating the effect before the cause, to sort of hide what’s really going on.

But any way one chooses to word things, the truth is the same:  the estimated 475,000 red snapper discarded dead by recreational fishermen outnumber the 22,797 annual recreational catch limit that anglers are allowed to bring home by a ratio of more than 20 to one.

I can understand why the angling industry and anglers’ rights crowd might not want that truth circulating too widely.

After all, they came up with the exempted fishing permit plan in an effort to kill even more fish, and if the public became aware that something like 95% of the South Atlantic red snapper that anglers are killing now are just feeding the sharks and the crabs, they might try to keep them from killing too many more.

Which brings us to the final truth that the organized red snapper anglers don’t really want you to know: That at least some of the waste could have been avoided, and both commercial and recreational landings could have been more than tripled, with no negative impact on the red snapper stock at all.

And NMFS knew how to do it.

On January 14, 2025, the agency issued a proposed Amendment 59 to the Fishery Management Plan for the Snapper-Grouper Fishery of the South Atlantic.  The proposed amendment would have resulted in a commercial quota of 346,000 pounds, instead of the current 102,951, and a recreational catch limit of 85,000 fish, instead of just 22,797.  The tradeoff was that it would close all fishing for species in the snapper-grouper complex, in all waters north of Cape Canaveral, Florida and south of the Florida-Georgia line, from December 1 to February 28; that three-month closure, in just that one area off northern Florida, was expected to reduce red snapper discard mortality by at least 24%.

The proposed amendment was no panacea.  It’s impossible—or at least very difficult—to fish one’s way out of the sort of discard mortality trap that has snagged South Atlantic red snapper anglers, for so long as fishing is still going on while the red snapper season is closed, some level of discard mortality will occur.  Even during the 39-day (Florida) and 62-day (Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina) seasons proposed in the now-enjoined exempted fishing permits, the season would have remained closed, and discard mortality would still have occurred, for 10 or 11 months of the year.

But the proposed amendment was at least way to cut down the waste, and turn some of the discards into landings.

One would like to think that the angling community would have had a well-enough developed sense of responsibility that it might have at least tried to mitigate some of the waste of the red snapper resource that it had been perpetuating for years, and supported the proposed amendment.

But that sort of integrity was apparently lacking, for the various recreational organizations went all-out to defeat it, instead. 

The American Sportfishing Association called for everyone to “Protect Access to Bottomfishing in the South Atlantic,” which wasn’t surprising, since the ASA’s members can always sell more stuff if the season is open, and the American Sportfishing Association’s overriding job is to help its members sell as much stuff as they can.

Florida Sportsman magazine came out against the amendment.  Its advertisers were probably pleased.

And the Coastal Conservation Association came out strongly against, perhaps a little unnerved at being asked to actually conserve something, when creating artificial reefs for anglers to fish on and supporting hatcheries that pump out fish for anglers to catch are more in its wheelhouse these days.

Their efforts were successful.  Anglers’ waste of nearly half a million red snapper goes on, while the recreational fishing organizations still try to find new and creative ways to kill more of them.

That’s why it’s important to keep the truth front and center, and not let it be buried alive.