Bycatch is a Hidden Threat to Gulf of Mexico Fisheries

A correction and additional take on the Fishery’s Management Council recent action could allow commercial shrimpers bycatch to threaten recovery of Red Snapper stocks.

Restoring the red snapper fishery in the Gulf of Mexico is one of the great conservation achievements of recent times. Bringing that fishery back from severe decline has not been without sacrifice and much controversy. Intense acrimony over harvest and allocation policies have sadly been the norm. Just as we have embarked on a new and promising approach to correct past mistakes in managing this iconic fishery, the Gulf of Mexico Fisheries Management Council (GOMFMC) seems to have taken a disappointing step backwards to allow an increase in shrimping bycatch. A step that, could wipe out years of restoration effort by allowing the commercial shrimp fleet to set aside what once required a court order to achieve.

I wrote opinion articles on this issue, recently published in Sportfishing and TIDE. In those articles I used NOAA published tables to calculate the potential impacts six years after the rollback, projecting 3.1 million pounds of red snapper lost every year. Those calculations were wrong. I misread the tables and while they were a bit ambiguous, that is no excuse. This was brought to my attention by longtime colleague Dr. Benny Galloway and confirmed by others whom I asked to examine those calculations. The use of fish excluder devices and reduction in overall fleet size, as Benny pointed out, has certainly had a positive impact and that this action will not threaten recovery. Nevertheless, my fundamental concerns for red snapper bycatch mortality and other non-directed catch remain.

Throughout the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico were in decline even as ever-more stringent harvest restrictions were implemented for the recreational and commercial red snapper fisheries. The population did not respond to conventional management measures even as recreational seasons dropped to just a handful of days. Then, a lawsuit forced NOAA Fisheries to reduce juvenile red snapper bycatch in shrimp trawls by 74 percent. That decision, coupled with a reduction of shrimping effort by some 80% after the 2005 hurricane season devastated the Gulf shrimp fleet, was the catalyst for the snapper population in the Gulf of Mexico to explode. Today, red snapper are often the only fish anglers can catch offshore and anglers are far more likely to express their frustration on an inability to get a bait past the snapper than anything else.

In April of this year, the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council approved a rollback of the red snapper bycatch reduction to 60 percent, down from the court-ordered 74 percent. Now, it could be rolled back even further in the future through simple framework actions. NOAA calculated that allowing the shrimp industry to increase its bycatch of juvenile red snapper by 14 percent will result in just a 200,000-pound decrease in the total allowable catch of red snapper, beginning in 2023. Evidence since 2005 would seem to indicate that figure under-estimates the impact of shrimp trawls, but with observer coverage on less than 1 percent of trips by the shrimp industry that number is, at best, uncertain. My initial calculations may have been in error but uncertainties in the data upon which they were made are significant and troubling.  Certainly, too uncertain to risk the progress that has been made in restoring the red snapper fishery.

Analysis used to support the rollback showed that red snapper bycatch is seemingly small, just 0.3 percent of all the finfish bycatch in shrimp trawls by weight. That is the good news for red snapper, if correct. An obvious question is “What is in the other 99.7 percent and what does that loss mean?” NOAA Fisheries did not analyze the composition of the bycatch, but it certainly includes species prized by anglers, both forage and sportfish. I think it would be important to know what that means. What is the total ecosystem impacts of the rollback? Again, no one really knows. A quick projection of the other species that would be killed in shrimp trawls under the preferred alternative in the rollback measure yields a potential loss of millions of pounds of fish. That is a real concern, the implications of which should be addressed, especially under the relatively new “ecosystem-based fisheries management” paradigms.

By rolling back the reduction in shrimp trawl bycatch, we are rolling the dice on the future of Gulf red snapper and possibly the ecosystem supporting them. Our Gulf is amazingly productive and resilient, bouncing back from hurricanes and even oil spills, but unless we wisely manage these resources, we put the amazing sustainability of the Gulf at risk.

In 2014 I led the Commission on Saltwater Recreational Fisheries Management, chaired by Johnny Morris and Scott Deal. In our report A Vision for Managing America’s Saltwater Recreational Fishery, one of our recommendations was conserving the forage base. That resource is vital for sustainability of economically important sportfish and it supports the underpinnings of ecosystem health. Forage base resilience is a great concern. Allowing the shrimp industry to increase its already significant bycatch, would be a move in the wrong direction. At a time when red snapper recovery is moving in a positive direction, we should not contemplate actions, the impact of which, we cannot adequately predict.