Red snapper are federally managed in the Gulf (e.g., in areas where state waters end out to 200 nautical miles offshore). The Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council is the group that develops measures to manage the stock. Those measures are then approved and implemented by NOAA Fisheries, which is the agency with regulatory authority over federal marine fisheries. Together, the Gulf Council and NOAA Fisheries make management decisions that must adhere to the requirements of the primary law governing marine fisheries, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.

In 1990, a red snapper rebuilding plan took effect to restore the overfished stock. Revised in 2005, the rebuilding plan has faced many obstacles, but it is now well more than halfway through a 27-year timeframe to restore a healthy stock by 2032. During the rebuilding process, the annual allowable red snapper catch has increased from a low of just five million pounds to more than 16 million pounds. In addition to the annual catch limits that help manage the red snapper fishery, permit requirements for commercial and for-hire vessels also are useful in managing the red snapper fishing effort.

Figure 1. Red snapper state management boundaries for the Gulf of Mexico. Light blue shading along the U.S. coast indicates state waters. The grey line indicates the boundary of the U.S. exclusive economic zone. Lettered lines in red indicate boundaries between state management jurisdictions within federal waters. The map is from a NOAA Fisheries and Gulf Council report.

Looking for a way to move forward and improve red snapper management, the Gulf Council and NOAA Fisheries tried using a form of regional management—known as “state management”—for private recreational fishing in federal waters. State management was tested through a special permit in 2018 and 2019. NOAA Fisheries divided the private recreational ACL into five slices, one slice for each Gulf state. The states were then delegated responsibility to set appropriate management measures in their extended state waters that would keep red snapper fishing levels below each state’s portion of the ACL and prevent overfishing. To supplement federal data, each state also developed its own survey methodology to estimate fish landings from their private recreational anglers.

In 2020, state managers formalized this system and made it the official way the five gulf states would co-manage the private recreational red snapper fishery under the federal fishery management plan. However, a critical issue remained: ensuring catch levels are sustainable.

The problem with state management: Different surveys create a data comparison issue

Although designed to complement the federal system, the new data collection approach under state management meant that six different surveys (five states and the federal government) were independently estimating recreational catch and effort. Because each survey has a unique design (which contains different biases and uncertainties in the process of estimating catch), the data from different surveys are not directly comparable and cannot be directly added together. They also can’t be used to directly compare whether catch has exceeded each state’s allocated ACL. In essence, the units each state uses to measure its catch differ from the units used to set the original ACLs (an unwieldy problem akin to having multiple currencies used in different countries with no currency exchange rate). This lack of data conversion led to repeated catch overages by the private recreational sector, and it even triggered an overfishing determination by NOAA Fisheries in 2019 when red snapper landings across all sectors exceeded the overfishing limit, or OFL.

Keeping the catch under the science-based annual catch limit is the cornerstone of the U.S. management system, and fishery managers work to set measures that are expected to constrain catch to stay under this limit (e.g., setting the number of days people can go fishing). Not only did the state management system for red snapper allow catch in excess of ACLs, the system was inconsistent with the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the federal law that governs fishery management. The catch overages likely led to localized areas where red snapper were severely depleted.

The good news is that there is a workable solution to deal with the differences in the data produced by state and federal surveys. The solution is called calibration. Unfortunately, it took fishery managers years to put this solution in place, which led to several years of overharvesting by the private recreational sector.

The solution for state management: Calibration

The Gulf states and the federal government have recently undertaken efforts to calibrate private recreational fishing data produced by the six surveys under state management, which has restored accurate accounting for catch in the recreational red snapper fishery and corrected the primary design flaw in state management. Calibration is a commonly used scientific practice that provides a way to translate estimates among surveys and preserve the reliability of long-term trends in data. The calibration process accounts for sources of variation and persistent differences in surveys and converts historical estimates of red snapper landings into a “common currency” for reporting. Calibration also allows scientists to integrate the various survey results when assessing the status of the red snapper stock as a whole—which in turn is used to estimate future ACLs—and should lead to better management of the stock.
To fix the data issues in state management, a multi-year, multi-organizational process has developed the necessary calibration ratios to make appropriate comparisons between state landings and ACL possible. With calibration, state management is finally a legal management system for Gulf red snapper and the private recreational sector.