Red snapper restoration a conservation success
The darkest days are seemingly in the past for red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico.
A restoration of the fishery, decades in the making, has blossomed into one of the most recent success stories in conservation.
“We have more snapper now than in anyone’s lifetime,” said Greg Stunz, director of the Harte Research Institute’s Sportfish Center at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi.
“And they’re big snapper.”
A federal plan to rebuild the fishery by 2032 is well ahead of schedule.
The goal is to increase the spawning potential to 26 percent, which means the stock would produce about a quarter of the eggs that an unfished population would. The estimated spawning biomass of red snapper in the Gulf is currently about 20 percent, a long climb from the sub-2 percent low mark of 1990.
“All indicators that are used in making the stock assessments show that the resource is at levels that have never really been seen before. It’s doing very well,” said Lance Robinson, deputy director of Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s coastal fisheries division.
It’s taken a long time to get to this point. The fishery had been in trouble for generations.
The development of technology and the rise of Gulf tourism led to the rapid decline of red snapper in the decades following World War II. The stock became severely overfished and continued to get worse.
Red snapper hit rock bottom in the 1980s and remained in a dire situation through the 1990s. Efforts to reverse course have gradually improved the fishery since then, especially in the western Gulf.
Anglers have paid the price to make it happen.
Reducing harvest has been crucial to rebuilding the stock. The daily bag limit in federal waters was reduced to two fish, and a 16inch minimum size limit was implemented in 2008. There is a four-fish limit and 15-inch minimum in state waters, which is within nine nautical miles from shore and can be fished yearround.
Most painful, though, were shortened seasons.
Recreational anglers enjoyed year-round access to red snapper in federal waters in 1996, then the season slowly evaporated. It dropped to 194 days from 2000-07. Then it was 65 in 2008, 48 in 2011 and a dismal nine days in 2014. A threeday season was announced in 2017 before Gulf states and the U.S. Department of Commerce brokered a deal to extend it 39 more days.
Since then, states have taken over setting the seasons for private recreational anglers, which has resulted in a trend of longer seasons and better access to a recovering stock. This year, Texas’ will end Aug. 3 after 63 days.
Greater accountability has also benefited red snapper.
Short seasons caused commercial fishermen to bumrush the fishery, creating a “derby-like” atmosphere. In 2007, Individual fishing quotas remedied this, allowing commercial fishermen to fish yearround as long as their landings stayed within a weight limit set by the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council. Commercial fishermen are required to report their harvests and are monitored electronically.
These management moves, as well as the addition of bycatch reduction devices to shrimp trawls and the overall decline of the Gulf shrimping industry, have been the keys to a successful red snapper rebuild.
“Shortening the seasons, reducing bag limits on the recreational side and getting out of the derbies on the commercial side has made us turn the corner,” said Scott Hickman, who has lived the ups and downs of red snapper during three decades of guiding out of Galveston.
“And now we’re having longer seasons again, there’s lots of fish. It worked. There were lots of sacrifices made, though.”
Strong management measures and a diminished shrimping industry have red snapper in a good spot that should continue to improve as the population ages. A 10-year-old red snapper produces 33 times more eggs than a 3-year-old, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
But there is still a long road ahead for the fishery and its human participants.
Anglers continue to hope for longer seasons. Finetuning on when the seasons occur is also a point of discussion. June can bring rough weather off the Texas coast. This summer, Tropical Storm Cristobal put a dent in the season. Some in the fishery prefer later dates and calmer seas. Others might want opportunities during spring break.
Controversy also exists about how allocation is divvied between the states.
More than two-thirds of the red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico occur off the coast of Texas and Louisiana. Yet, the two states make up a little more than a quarter of the total recreational allocation for the Gulf Coast. Texas’ 265,105 pounds is only greater than the 151,550 pounds for Mississippi, a state with 62 miles of coastline. Florida and Alabama combine for 3,036,113 pounds, or over 71 percent of the allocation.
Those fish aren’t moving a lot, either. Robinson said red snapper have a lot of “site fidelity,” and when they recruit to a structure, they don’t usually move far from it.
“Tagging studies have demonstrated this over and over again: Red snapper that occur off of Texas are not swimming at some point in their life to water off of Florida, or vice versa,” Robinson said.
The distribution is based on decades of landing data, and the East Coast has traditionally been the side with the most fishing pressure. Currently, location is not figured into the allocation.
Hickman and others think that should change. He is a strong believer in a need for a “biomass component to how the fishery is allocated.”
“In a way, Texas and Louisiana run a fish bank for the eastern Gulf,” Hickman said.
The results of the “Great Red Snapper Count” could have an impact on how the fishery is managed in the future. Researchers are currently wrapping up the $12 million project that began in 2017.
Stunz is the lead scientist among 22 investigators and 11 institutions that include “pretty much the greatest minds in red snapper biology across the Gulf.”
The project utilized remotely operated vehicles, towed cameras and divers to count red snapper from Brownsville to Key West. The goal was to estimate the absolute abundance.
“It’s kind of crazy to think we don’t really know what that number is given the importance of that fishery,”
Stunz said.
The hope is if the Great Red Snapper Count finds more fish, then that will equate into more weight in the total allocation and more season days. The project is being finalized in the coming weeks, and Stunz is “very optimistic” about what his team has seen so far.
The results could have an effect on the next red snapper stock assessment in 2021 and represents another milestone in an evolving conservation success story.