Last year’s red snapper season was less than spectacular. Here’s an outlook on what anglers can expect after this year’s season opener.
Amberjack were the scourge of red snapper anglers last year, with the muscle-bound beasts often snagging baits before snapper even got a shot. “The amberjacks would follow your baits back to the boat when you reeled them up,” Fourchon’s Capt. Chris Moran.
So as the snapper season ended with a fizzle in October, many anglers chalked up the scant fishing to the abundance of AJs.
But some didn’t quite buy into that theory.
“It could be that the AJs were so aggressive and were eating all the bait, and the snapper just went elsewhere,” Capt. Myron Fischer said. “But we were fishing in 80, 90, 120 feet of water where you didn’t have any AJs, and you still didn’t have snapper.”
Although Fischer, who sits on the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council, didn’t really have any theories on where the fish went, he said there are indications that snapper are plentiful off Louisiana’s coast in advance of this year’s season opener.
The 2004 season opens April 21 and will run through Oct. 31.
“Initial indications from commercial and recreational amberjack fishermen are that they’re catching quality and quantity of snapper,” Fischer said.
Moran agreed.
“We had to leave two or three spots to get away from them,” he said of a recent trip.
This charter captain said he also has been encouraged by the sizes of snapper he’s seen while targeting other species this year.
“They were real nice ones,” Moran said. “They were all 8 to 10 pounds.”
If that holds up through the season, it would be a welcomed change from last year, when most snapper that were hooked had to be released.
“You’d have to go through 30 or 40 fish to catch three or four keepers,” Moran said.
While Moran and other snapper afficionados crossed their fingers and hoped for a great season, fisheries managers have been trying to get an idea of the health of the stock.
That’s not an easy thing to do, since all the research on the species began only relatively recently.
“The problem is we don’t have a lot of data on this fish when it was a virgin stock,” said Phil Steele of the National Marine Fisheries’ Southeast Regional Office in St. Petersburg, Fla. “It’s been fished since the 1850s, so it’s been a large fishery for 130 years.”
By the early 1990s, the pressure on the fishery had resulted in a dramatic drop in numbers of snapper.
A study by LSU Coastal Fisheries Institute’s Charles A. Wilson and David L. Nieland found that commercial landings of snapper in US territorial waters fell from historic highs of 6,389 metric tons in 1965 to 1,015 metric tons in 1991. Recreational landings mirrored that drop, moving from 4,734 metric tons in 1979 to 581 metric tons in 1990.
Those figures include catches in all US waters (red snapper range as far north along the Atlantic Coast as Massachusetts), but the same trend was seen in the Gulf.
In the 1960s, Gulf of Mexico commercial fishermen landed more than 10 million pounds of snapper per year, while in the 1980s, the figure was less than 6 million pounds annually.
But there are some anecdotal signs that indicate regulations enacted in 1984 are beginning to pay off, despite last year’s poor season.
“We’re seeing red snapper in areas of the eastern Gulf that we haven’t seen them in 20 years,” Steele said.
These catches have come in waters off the southwest coast of Florida.
However, it’s not really clear whether these new, localized populations are due to snapper simply moving to escape overcrowded habitat in the northern Gulf.
“It depends on how the snapper got there,” Fischer said. “If they expanded because one of the last hurricanes blew them over there, then that doesn’t mean anything.”
Determining exactly what’s going on is made more difficult by the species’ life cycle.
Snapper don’t spend much of their life-span lurking around reefs and oil rigs, despite what anglers might believe.
They begin life in open water, which is the beginning of their troubles as a population.
“They start out in the shrimping grounds, so they are vulnerable to nets,” Nieland said.
In fact, mortality of juvenile snapper due to shrimping is the major reason why the species is in trouble. In fact, shrimping is even more detrimental than the combined pressure from commercial fisherman and recreational anglers, he said.
“One of the biggest problems is the number of juvenile red snapper caught in shrimp trawls,” Steele said. “With the bycatch reduction devices, we’re seeing about a 40-percent reduction in bycatch, but it’s still too high. We need to see more snapper survive.
“We think even if the recreational and commercial fisheries ended tomorrow we’d still need to see some reduction in the bycatch from the shrimp industry.”
Those snapper that manage to dodge the nets move to large structures, such as oil and gas platforms, at about two years of age.
“They recruit to structure around two years of age, and they stay around that structure for about five or six years,” Nieland said.
And then snapper, by and large, turn their backs on such easy-to-find vertical structure and all but disappear.
Since individual snapper have been documented to survive for as many as 50 years, that means less than 15 percent of their life span is spent in areas easily identifiable to anglers and researchers.
Exactly how long they live and where the big, mature fish go, no one is exactly sure.
“In the mid 1980s, we had data on these old fish from the longliners,” Nieland said. “Now that fishery is gone, and we have no way of sampling those old fish.”
Researchers know that these big, mature snapper seek out isolated bottom structure, but they are so scattered that anglers (recreational or commercial) simply don’t catch many of them.
“The majority of our samples are 7 years old or less,” Nieland said.
Anglers might scoff at this, pointing out that they regularly catch fish weighing more than 15 pounds.
Well, Nieland said size and weight of snapper have little relation to age.
“You can’t go by size,” he said. “A 20-pound snapper could be anywhere from 8 to 40 years old.”
That’s because, like many long-lived fish, snapper reach a certain size and pretty much stop growing.
In fact, even trained experts have a hard time aging old snapper using otoliths.
“The annuli (rings formed during each year of a fish’s life) on the otolith get very narrow, so they are hard to count,” Nieland said. “When they get 40 years old, you get out to the edge of the otolith, and the rings are very close together.”
What this all means is that management practices are based on the best sampling of the species, which now comes mainly from commercial and recreational fishermen focusing on rigs and large artificial reefs.
That means that the health of the populations of 2- to 6-year-old snapper pretty much dictates how the entire species is managed.
That would be scary if more fish from those age classes were harvested than were entering the fisheries, but Nieland said indications are that this isn’t a problem.
“There doesn’t seem to be any lack of new fish recruiting into the fishery,” Steele explained. “Fishermen are telling me there are more fish in the water, and more small fish.”
So does this mean that there are plenty of mature snapper to rebuild the overall population?
Maybe, maybe not.
Nieland pointed to a University of South Alabama study that looked at the importance of age classes to reproductive capability.
“The study showed that females off the Alabama coast mature at a younger and at a smaller size than over here (off Louisiana),” he said.
That brings into question the importance of old snapper to the spawn.
“As a female snapper gets bigger, it’s naturally going to have more room (in its body) to carry more eggs,” Nieland said. “If you have a lot of old females laying a lot of eggs, then they are important.”
However, he said the Alabama study proved a truism in nature.
“Fish populations will compensate for changes in population,” he said. “If you have a lot of young fish and not many big fish, your females will mature at a smaller and smaller size to compensate.”
Exactly why waters off Louisiana tend to hold bigger, more mature snapper is a bit of a mystery, but the lesson is that even if there are not an overabundance of huge sows there will be an awful lot of juvenile snapper produced.
And Nieland said the key is to manage the species to ensure long-term health.
“I look at red snapper more like a forest than a corn field,” he said. “You manage a forest so that you have a constant harvest over the years. That’s how you want to manage red snapper.
“You manage shrimp like a corn field. It’s more an annual crop.”
And Nieland and Steele agree that the current management regime seems to be working.
“I would have to say the regulations have been effective,” Steele said. “It’s still got a ways to go, but I think they have been effective.”
Don’t think, however, that regulations will be loosened any time soon.
“It’s considered to be one of the most overfished fisheries in the Southeast,” Steele said.
And the use of that word “overfished” is very important, Fischer said.
“You’ve got two key words: ‘overfished’ and ‘overfishing,’” he explained. “‘Overfished’ means we caught the hell out of them, and the populations are low. ‘Overfishing’ means if we continue to fish at this pace, they will be overfished.”
That means that Steele and other managers still believe the overall stock of red snapper in the Gulf is low, even if it is gaining.
To try and get a better handle on just where the species stands, the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council is beginning a stock assessment this spring.
The first committee meeting, during which all pertinent information will be compiled and reviewed, will be held April 19-23 at New Orleans’ International House hotel.
Steele said he expected a final stock assessment to be released by the beginning of 2005.
Fischer said that if the results show the population has not improved, anglers could be looking at a reduction in the total allowable catch.
Another danger is that the feds determine the annual TAC is reached earlier.
“Now they’re catching snapper out of Tampa Bay, where they used to not catch any,” he said. “The TAC is still 9 million pounds, no matter where you catch them.”
In other words, if the expanded population now allows more commercial and recreational fishermen to catch snapper, the 9-million-pound TAC could be reached early.
That might not affect this year’s season, but federal regulators could decide to shorten the season in coming years.
Until then, Steele said he was hopeful that the upcoming season would be successful.
“We’ll find out how it looks come April 21,” he said.
Fischer said he expected at least a good opener, since the commercial fishing has been limited by the weather.
“They’re still going out, but it’s been so rough that they haven’t been able to catch as many of them,” he said. “If the April (commercial) season is the same as the past couple of months, there could be a lot more snapper in the water come April 21.”
However, he feared that catches would quickly falter.
“As the seas calm down, the commercials will catch their quota and the recreationals will be hammering on them,” Fischer said. “Then it’s a crap shoot.”
