Fishing for dozens of kinds of fish could become illegal from Central Florida to Charleston, S.C., because of a federal agency’s work to protect one species, the red snapper.
That could shut down much of the commercial and sport fishing industries in a large swath of the Southeastern coast, with some restrictions potentially lasting up to 35 years.
The restrictions being considered by the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council have alarmed many people involved in fishing, who say they’ve never seen such far-reaching plans.
“The red snapper closure will stop fishing, period,” said Vic Lloyd, a Mayport-based commercial fisherman who formerly sat on an advisory board for the management council.
“It affects people all down the line, from the people who manufacture the boats to … people who like to eat fish.”
Advocates for the restrictions say red snapper have been fished until the older snappers — the ones best suited for breeding — are nearly depleted.
They say the government’s research shows the stock of red snapper in the Southeast is just 3 percent of what it was in the 1950s, a conclusion that opponents say is wildly wrong.
“We have a population that’s really, really young and fishing rates that are really, really high, and that’s not a good combination,” said Holly Binns, Tallahassee-based manager of a campaign against over-fishing run by an arm of the Pew Charitable Trusts.
That arm, the Pew Environment Group, campaigned earlier in the decade for legislation updating a cornerstone of American fishing policy, the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Act.
The update that Congress drafted in 2006 required fishery management councils to know which species were being caught too fast to sustain their populations, then adopt fishing rules that would let those species rebuild. Those protective rules had to be adopted within a year of when the management council recognized a problem, the new law said.
The management council hasn’t settled on a snapper plan yet but scheduled hearings in Jacksonville and other cities to get feedback about a range of possible restrictions.
A red snapper stock assessment that was updated this year led council employees to conclude the fish were so imperiled they needed a solution bigger than shutting down snapper fishing.
Because fishermen catch a lot of snappers accidentally while targeting other species, the management council is considering four different plans for shutting down any fishing that might lead to those accidental catches, called bycatch. The plans affect different sections of the ocean, but they all apply to nearly every one of about 70 fish the council lumps together as the “snapper grouper management complex” because they’re found in similar locations.
That last step has people in the fishing industry stunned and alarmed.
“That would devastate a lot of people,” said Gerald Pack, a longtime Mayport seafood merchant.
“It’s a pretty drastic step. I don’t understand the philosophy they take,” Pack said. “A total closure, that’s like closing the highway.”
The closure areas would also apply to recreational fishing, from head boats carrying dozens of people offshore for a few hours to charter vessels and weekend boaters.
But with the impacts spread between more interests, the number of groups questioning the need for all of the restrictions has increased.
Calling the potential rules “unprecedented in their breadth and scope,” an executive of the nonprofit Coastal Conservation Association asked federal officials in July to revisit the idea.
The association, started decades ago by recreational anglers, has a long history of championing fishing regulations, including a net ban Florida voters approved in 1994. But it has balked at the snapper proposal, questioning whether it’s based on good science.
“In this special instance where the potential economic ramifications are so severe, we believe there must be another review,” the association’s government relations chairman, Chester Brewer, wrote to a regional administrator for the National Marine Fisheries Service.
Florida Sportsman magazine founder Karl Wickstrom, a leading advocate for Florida’s net ban in the 1990s, joined the new debate by writing in his magazine’s November issue that federal scientists are “cherry-picking” data to support drastic solutions. Two scientists also critique the management council’s study of snapper populations in the same issue.
At dock in Mayport, Lloyd’s son, 36-year-old Brian Lloyd, points to his catch records from two trips in eight days this month when the boat’s three-man crew landed close to 4,000 pounds of red snapper. Fish weighing eight to 12 pounds, a decent size for a snapper, made up the largest part of the catches, according to those records.
Advocates for new restrictions say an apparent abundance of fish right now is a passing illusion, a result of a burst in reproduction a decade ago that isn’t fully understood — and hasn’t continued. They say cutting back fishing is the only chance to stop declines in the snapper population, and that it will take time to see how fast the fish rebound.
“The South Atlantic council needs to enact measures that are as protective as their scientific advisors say are necessary,” Binns said.
“You need to end over-fishing of red snapper for a period of time,” she said, “and I don’t think anyone knows how long that will be.”
Labels: red snapper closure
