Coastal Conservation Association (CCA)

Gulf Red Snapper – The State of the Fishery

The management of red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico has become one of the most contentious fisheries issues in recent history. As with so many aspects of resource management, agreement among stakeholders is rare.

The current problems we face in the red snapper fishery are not overnight developments. They have been brewing for almost 30 years.

But even within this quagmire of political posturing and bureaucratic red tape, there exist some certainties. First and foremost is CCA’s dedication to the future of the red snapper fishery and the participation of recreational anglers in this fishery.

“Recreational anglers are not the problem in this fishery, and never have been,” said Fred Miller, chairman of CCA’s Government Relations Committee. “Gross bycatch of snapper by the shrimp industry got us here. The focus of management should not be on lowering the catch limits for anglers. The focus should be on properly managing all impacts on this fishery, and shrimp trawl bycatch is far and away the largest impact.”

BACKGROUND

To understand the evolving management of red snapper and CCA’s involvement, it is important to review the past as we chart a new future.

Although it is difficult to encapsulate the history of red snapper management, there are a few highlights that help map this twisting path. The earliest waypoint is represented by records from the late 1880s that show small sailing vessels used dead reckoning and handlines to catch red snapper solely off the western coast of Florida and managed to land almost 2.5 million pounds of snapper a year.

Fast forward about 100 years and by 1979, the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council (Gulf Council) had determined that red snapper stocks were overfished. An estimated 87 percent drop in recreational harvest from 1980 to 1984 prompted the Gulf Council to create its “Reef Fish Management Plan.” This program became law in 1984 and was implemented by National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) in the late 1980s.

The Gulf Council recommended an extensive rebuilding plan for red snapper. An integral part of this program was new and intensive restrictions on commercial and recreational catches coupled with a new-found realization that a majority of juvenile red snapper mortality was caused by shrimp trawls. The rebuilding plan set a time frame and a minimum red snapper biomass as targets for full recovery of the species.

“Recreational anglers have always been willing to be the first to endure regulation fot he betterment of the resource,” said Pat Murray, CCA vice president and director of conservation. “From redfish to red snapper, anglers have always been conservationists. But the real cause of the problem, shrimp bycatch, is simply being ignored, and that is just bad management.”

To reach the desired stock number, fisheries managers continued to clamp down on commercial and recreational anglers yet were unable to implement bycatch reduction devices (BRDs) to reduce commercial Gulf shrimpers’ impact on juvenile red snapper numbers. More than 80 percent of every year class of Gulf red snapper is caught and killed in shrimp trawls at an average size of 4 inches. Unfortunately, a 1990 congressional mandate that CCA opposed prevented BRDs from being required in federal waters.

Reauthorization of the Magnuson Act into the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act in 1996 forever changed the arena of federal fisheries management. Within this document are the components needed for the prevention of overfishing, addressing the issue of bycatch, and rebuilding overfished fisheries. A floor amendment allowed the Gulf Council to treat shrimp-fishery bycatch like any other in the country.

A last-minute amendment added to the law changed the recreational red snapper “allotment” to a “quota.” The law required NMFS to close a fishery when its “quota” is reached. Thus, this change in terminology resulted in the 1997, 1998, and 1999 recreational closures for red snapper when the total allowable catch (TAC) was reached. The federal government had set the allocation of red snapper at 51 percent commercial and 49 percent recreational in 1989, based on records of recreational and commercial harvest in the 1980s.

By law, the rebuilding process for red snapper must not take more than 29 years. For this to be an attainable goal, NMFS had to address the problem of bycatch in the shrimping industry. In the spring of 1998, the Gulf Council passed an amendment to require BRDs for shrimp trawls in federal waters. The Texas Shrimp Association sued in opposition to the bycatch reduction requirements and CCA intervened to ensure that shrimp fleet would have to do its part.

With the BRD requirement in place, the recovery of red snapper was premised on closed seasons, commercial quotas, recreational bag limits, size limits and a 40 percent reduction in bycatch due to BRDs.

The introduction of BRDs in 1998 allowed recreational and commercial anglers to roughly split a 9.12 million-pound annual Total Allowable Catch (TAC). The only thing that curtailed an effort to reduce the TAC to 6 million pounds in 1998 was CCA’s successful work for the implementation of BRDs.

BYCATCH REDUCTION DEVICES

Assessment work by the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council in 2004 revealed that these measures have not had the desired effect on red snapper stocks, despite adherence to those quotas by both commercial and recreational fishers. The average recreational catch from 2000-03 was 4.091 million pounds a year, 8 percent below the allocated 4.469 million pounds per year. Commercial landings over the same period averaged 4.663 million pounds, slightly above the 4.651 million pound annual quota.

While the quota targets have largely been met, studies in 2004 by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) revealed that BRDs had achieved only a 12 percent reduction in red snapper bycatch in the shrimp trawl fishery. Non-compliance by shrimpers was cited as the primary reason for this failure. This failure by the Gulf’s shrimp industry to honor their part of the red snapper recovery plan has now placed the entire recovery effort for the species in jeopardy.

Gulf fishery managers are now confronted with a shorter list of options for red snapper that includes further reduced commercial quotas, tighter recreational bag limits, and shorter seasons for both recreational and commercial fishermen.

CCA has insisted that it is impossible for the Gulf Council to set the total allowable catch for the directed fishery without taking into account measures to reduce shrimp trawl bycatch.

"Without addressing the shrimp bycatch problem, recreational anglers will again carry the entire burden of management while the shrimp trawl fishery is ignored,” said Murray. “Recreational angler management is often the easiest solution for fishery managers, but that does not make it the best.”

In March of 2005, CCA petitioned the Secretary of Commerce to put emergency measures into effect to end the Gulf of Mexico shrimp fleet's overfishing of red snapper. That petition was denied despite almost 8,000 supporting comments from CCA members and other conservationists around the Gulf Coast.

A few months later, CCA filed a lawsuit over Amendment 22 to the Reef Fish Management Plan, also known as the Red Snapper Rebuilding Plan.

The CCA lawsuit is seeking to achieve significant shrimp trawl bycatch reduction on the order of 60-80 percent through measures such as bycatch quotas, areas closed to shrimping, seasonal shrimping closures and significant reduction in shrimping effort. The suit continues to make its way through U.S. District Court in Houston.

“After decades of attempting to manage this fishery by lowering the TAC for the directed fishery, it is time to address the fundamental problem impacting red snapper,” said David Cummins, CCA president. “All fishing by the recreational and commercial sectors could end right now and snapper would still not recover due to continuing shrimp trawl bycatch. That tells us that lowering the TAC is not the answer to recovering this resource.”

The current status of the red snapper fishery is confusing at best. There are no slam-dunks in the modern arena of stock management. And there is not one factor alone that when eliminated will cause an immediate repair or rebuilding of the population.

Even in the rubble of the statistics, speculation and emotion that cloud this issue, there are still some definitive conclusions. Without the immediate implementation of measures to reduce shrimp trawl bycatch, and maintain or reduce the current shrimp trawl effort, recreational anglers will be left to carry the weight of management.

“Trying to manage red snapper without addressing shrimp trawl bycatch is like trying to lower your electric bill by buying a more efficient toaster oven. Your electric bill isn’t high because of your toaster oven; it’s the large and leaky air conditioning unit running around the clock,” says Russell Nelson, CCA’s consultant to the Gulf Council. “In the end, lowering the TAC for recreational anglers will not pay the bill to recover red snapper.”