Red Snapper: Ecology and Fisheries in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico

Fisheries Management and Conservation Overview

James H. Cowan, Jr.

doi: https://doi.org/10.47886/9781888569971.ch17

The third section of this book contains 8 papers devoted to red snapper Fisheries Management and Conservation, and well illustrates how far our understanding both of ecology and stock dynamics has progressed since 1989 when the first rebuilding plan was implemented. The first paper in this section is by Hood, who provides a detailed description of the controversial history of red snapper management in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico. The second paper, by Hanisko and coauthors, describes the development and use of indices of larval abundance; relative abundance estimates are derived separately for the eastern and western Gulf of Mexico and are used as tuning indices in stock assessments. Nieland and coauthors in paper 3 of this section report a significant decrease in mean total length at age for ages 2–6 years in commercial catches of red snapper off Louisiana, and provide contrasting interpretations of potential causes for their observations. Allman and Fitzhugh use otolith-aged red snapper obtained from landings by commercial hook and line, longline and the recreational sector over a 12-year period to examine differences in age-structure over time and space, relative year-class success, and the impacts of observed differences on each sector of the fishery. In a second paper in this section, Neiland and coauthors describe samples taken in cooperation with commercial fishers off Louisiana to show that both regulatory discard and mortality rates were high during their study and conclude that minimum size regulations appear to do little to protect juvenile red snapper from commercial fishing mortality. The historical reconstruction of landings data is the subject of a paper by Porch and coauthors, who conclude that a substantial fishery for red snapper existed in the Gulf of Mexico as early as 1872, and that by the turn of the century landings were comparable to those of recent times, but may have been more dependent upon fishing grounds located in Mexico. Porch contributes another paper to this section that illustrates the state of assessment science for red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico, describing a fl exible agestructured assessment model that includes data back to the inception of the fishery as described above. Porch’s results are consistent with the most recent NMFS findings, based upon a shorter time-series of landings data, that are being used to define the current biological bench marks for the red snapper stock (SEDAR 2005). Interpretation of results from both Porch and the NMFS assessments indicate that red snapper biomass and other biological benchmarks are well below levels in the Gulf of Mexico that are considered to be risk-averse from a conservation perspective, and that stocks are not likely to recover in the near-term without substantial reductions in fishing mortality relative to assessed levels. In the final paper in this section of the book, Strelcheck and Hood provide more support for the above assertion, reporting that red snapper remain overfished and are experiencing overfishing based upon the most recent NMFS assessment (SEDAR 2005), and cast further doubt about whether existing plans for rebuilding the stock will be sufficient to accomplish long-term goals, even given that recovery under the plan is not required until the year 2032.