This is a guest opinion

During my 21 years as an Alabama representative to the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council, I’ve seen just about every type of fisheries management dilemma imaginable. Our Gulf fish stocks are subject to myriad pressures and Council members must often grapple with profoundly complicated problems in their efforts to manage our marine resources in a sustainable fashion.

Perhaps the most controversial of all those marine resources is the red snapper fishery, and it is a job that could be made much easier with just a few simple changes to the federal fisheries management process.

For one thing, my years of research on red snapper has found that this species does not migrate. In my work at the University of South Alabama, we organized hundreds of research cruises to tag red snapper at reef sites all over the Alabama coast and found that the species demonstrates tremendous site fidelity. In some instances, we recorded tag recaptures for 20 years at the same reef site! The research demonstrates that red snapper could be managed much more effectively as a resident species according to the population and habitat characteristics off our coast.

Instead, the federal management process treats the red snapper fishery as a single entity, from the Florida Keys to Brownsville, Texas. That approach ignores the vast differences in habitat and fishing pressure that exists across the five Gulf Coast states and instead applies a one-size-fits-all management strategy. Treating a fishery spread across such a diverse ecosystem as a single population with a single quota is bound to produce unnecessarily disparate management measures and opens the door for a lot of mistakes.

Similarly, recreational catch is one of the crucial data streams at the heart of every management decision, and yet federal efforts to accurately quantify it have failed miserably for decades. Just this past August, NOAA Fisheries announced that a study of the mailed survey it uses to estimate recreational fishing effort may be over-estimating recreational effort by 30 to 40 percent. In an endeavor that desperately needs hard data to function, this kind of failure has a devastating impact on the legitimacy of the entire federal fisheries management system. Even more troubling is the fact that federal managers knew about these flaws, which they did not share with the council, and forced “recalibrations” that caused major changes in fishing quota to some states, including Alabama.

In 2020, after decades of frustration over Gulf red snapper management, the Gulf states were given the authority to use their own data systems to monitor what their state’s recreational anglers were catching. Alabama’s Snapper Check data system used an electronic reporting system and dockside surveys to gather trip information, as well as length and weight measurements from landed fish. It was significantly more accurate than the federal system and allowed for almost real-time management of recreational quotas.

Unfortunately, because Alabama still operates within the federal recreational data system, the state’s data are required to be recalibrated back into the federal data system…the same one that was declared to be incorrect by 30 to 40 percent this summer. The entire reason for the states to develop their own systems was to provide faster, more accurate, reliable information. Recalibrating back to the broken federal system is an unnecessary step backwards.

The simple solution is for Alabama to leave the federal recreational data program altogether and there is precedent for this. The West Coast states left the federal system decades ago, for the very same reasons Alabama and the Gulf states were compelled to develop their own data programs – they determined the federal data program was simply beyond salvaging. They built their own better systems, just as Alabama has. Texas has never been part of the system and Louisiana opted out five years ago. It’s time for Alabama to do the same!

The Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources should be commended for the work it put into Snapper Check. It is one of the finest data systems in the Gulf and infinitely more capable of managing this state’s recreational fishing sector. Now it is time to take the only logical next step and declare independence from the federal data system once and for all.

Management of red snapper and our other offshore fisheries doesn’t have to be an ongoing train wreck, fraught with uncertainty from year to year. Regionalizing management and abandoning the federal recreational data program are two relatively easy steps that would inject some much-needed stability into the management of our Gulf marine resources.

Dr. Bob Shipp served on the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council for 21 years. He is considered one of the foremost experts on red snapper, triggerfish and other species of importance to recreational fishermen of the Gulf Coast states. He is the Chair Emeritus of the Department of Marine Science at the University of South Alabama and is a former member of the Alabama Conservation Advisory Board which advises the Commissioner of the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and the Governor of Alabama on conservation related issues. He was the long-time judge of the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo, the largest fishing tournament in the world, and has more than 50 years of experience in the fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico.