Why It Matters: The red snapper season in the South Atlantic lasted only 24 hours in 2024. A proposed Secretarial Amendment to the Snapper-Grouper Fishery Management Plan would have provided a few more days in 2025, but it came with an unacceptable tradeoff of a large area closure to all bottom fishing for three months. Fortunately, the bottom closure is now off the table, but the red snapper season will again be brief at only two days in 2025. The exceedingly short seasons, despite the high abundance of red snapper, begs for a management paradigm shift in the region. The Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation (CSF) has supported a transition to state management since 2020. Governors DeSantis, Kemp, and McMaster agree that it is time for a shift in a letter sent last week to the Secretary of Commerce.
Highlights:
- While the proposed large area bottom closure in Amendment 59 to the Snapper-Grouper Fishery Management plan was removed and represented a victory for recreational anglers, the federal red snapper season is again projected to be very brief in 2025.
- CSF fully supports the states of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina in their recent request to assume management of red snapper and other important recreational fisheries in the South Atlantic.
Despite the highest abundance of red snapper in the South Atlantic ever to be documented, the 2024 red snapper season lasted a total of 24 hours. Aside from an inefficient commercial management model being applied to the recreational sector, the short red snapper season is an artifact of the National Marine Fisheries Service’s (NMFS) Marine Recreational Information Program’s (MRIP) inability to estimate recreational dead discards, or fish that are thrown back and assumed to die when the season is closed the rest of the year. Many of the released fish survive, but a percentage are estimated to die and are counted towards the total available removals (annual catch limit, also known as the ACL) from the population each year. However, even with the theoretically high MRIP-based estimates of discards, the South Atlantic red snapper population continues to grow more rapidly than projected. The math simply does not add up.
Last year, a U.S. District Judge signed a settlement agreement between NMFS and plaintiffs from the commercial fishing industry to end overfishing of red snapper in the South Atlantic by June of 2025. As a result, NMFS proposed a Secretarial amendment (as opposed to a normal council-led amendment) to the Snapper-Grouper FMP using an updated stock assessment that determined the fishery is no longer overfished or undergoing overfishing, which effectively meets the court mandate. However, the proposed amendment went well beyond the court settlement agreement, including implementing a proposed large area bottom closure to all fishing for the 55 species in the snapper-grouper complex, not just fishing for red snapper. Fortunately, that closure is off the table, but the continued high discard mortality estimated by MRIP will result in a two-day red snapper season in 2025.
Anglers in the Gulf were facing a very similar challenge in 2017, where, despite the extremely high abundance of red snapper, NMFS set the private recreational season for just three days. It was “the straw that broke the camel’s back”, and anglers and Members of Congress called for shifting from federal to state management of red snapper. Soon after, the Trump Administration extended the season by 39 days while simultaneously urging the states to come together on a plan to manage the recreational sector themselves with their own data collection programs moving forward.
It worked. Today, the Gulf states red snapper seasons are measured in months, not hours, while the red snapper population remains healthy and abundant. Fortunately, the Governors of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina have signaled to the Secretary of Commerce that they are ready to follow suit in the South Atlantic and sent a letter to that effect last week. CSF has and will continue to support the move to state management of not only the red snapper fishery, but all recreational fisheries in the South Atlantic.
Sometimes you must break something to fix it. Management of the recreational sector in the South Atlantic is clearly broken. CSF looks forward to working with any willing state to gather better data and more effectively manage fisheries than the federal status quo allows.
