Federal regulators have cut the 2014 recreational red snapper season in the Gulf of Mexico to just nine days, a decision that has infuriated charter captains, recreational anglers and coastal business owners across Alabama’s Gulf Coast.
The shortened season, announced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, marks one of the tightest windows on record for private anglers hoping to catch the popular reef fish in federal waters. The nine-day window is a dramatic drop from the roughly 40-day season Alabama fishing officials had projected as recently as late last year.
The reduction comes after Louisiana and Florida both announced state-water seasons that will not align with federal rules. Louisiana plans to allow snapper fishing in its state waters for 265 days out of the year, while Florida, which has historically stuck close to federal guidelines, set a 52-day season of its own earlier this year. Alabama’s Gulf waters extend only a short distance offshore before anglers enter federal jurisdiction, leaving the state’s fishermen far more exposed to the shortened federal window than their neighbors.
Despite the shorter season, the federal fishery will still open as scheduled on June 1. Anglers fishing in federal waters will continue to be held to a two-fish daily bag limit and a 16-inch minimum size requirement, both carried over from prior seasons.
The cuts have reignited a long-running fight over how NOAA calculates the health of Gulf red snapper stocks. Critics, including U.S. Rep. Bradley Byrne, argue the agency’s methodology dramatically understates the size of the snapper population and unfairly punishes Alabama’s coastal economy as a result.
“Alabama’s fishermen and coastal communities are being devastated by the federal government’s total inability to effectively regulate red snapper fishing,” Byrne said in a statement responding to the announcement. “Today’s development merely serves to highlight the fact that the federal regulatory framework is broken beyond repair.”
Byrne said the only lasting fix is to shift authority over the fishery away from federal regulators and give Gulf states control over managing their own snapper stocks. He noted that data gathered independently by marine scientists and working fishermen paints a far healthier picture of the snapper population than NOAA’s official assessments reflect, yet the federal agency’s numbers have repeatedly driven seasons shorter and quotas smaller in recent years.
The current crunch traces back to a federal court ruling handed down in late March. U.S. District Judge Barbara J. Rothstein ruled against the National Marine Fisheries Service after finding that recreational anglers in the Gulf of Mexico had exceeded their share of the red snapper quota in six of the previous seven years. Rothstein’s order directed the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council to take corrective action to offset those overages during the 2014 season, and with little time left before the season would normally open, an extremely short window emerged as the only practical way to comply.
A fresh assessment of the Gulf snapper population is currently underway and could be finished before the end of the year, but at least one member of the council overseeing the fishery isn’t convinced a new count will solve the underlying problem. Dr. Bob Shipp, chairman of the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of South Alabama and a member of the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council, said the quota system itself, not the size of the snapper population, is driving the shorter seasons.
“This whole issue is insane,” Shipp said. “Our problem is the quota system. The healthier the stock, the quicker we blow through the quota. If the stocks were in trouble, we couldn’t meet the quota.”
Shipp explained that because red snapper in the Gulf have grown both larger and more numerous in recent years, anglers are able to reach the fishery’s weight-based catch limits far more quickly than the current rules anticipate, which in turn forces regulators to compress the season to keep the total harvest in check.
“Even if they raised the quota by 30 or 40 percent, that would only mean an extra four or five days,” he added. “There’s so many big fish, we’d still catch the quota in no time. We need to get away from this quota system.”
For now, Alabama anglers, charter operators and coastal businesses that depend on snapper season traffic are left planning around a nine-day window in June, with the broader fight over how the Gulf’s most popular reef fish is managed still far from resolved.