Seeing Red Again

Recalibrating quotas based on fishing-effort surveys gave more red grouper to recreational anglers in the Gulf of Mexico. Commercial interests are crying foul.

- By Rip Cunningham

The Gulf of Mexico is back The in the headlines-or still in the news, anyway. The latest isn't about red snapper, but red grouper. It's still a heated conversation about whose ox gets gored. Unlike some management issues, this one has layers of complications.

Jumping back to 2006, the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council was faced with having to allocate red grouper between recreational and commercial users. Some believe this is the hardest thing that fisheries managers have to do. It may be the most contentious because it determines winners and losers, but if the process that the allocation is based on is transparent, thoughtful and fair, my feeling is that the stakeholders have little to complain about. Of course, that does not mean they won't.

Amendment 30B to the Fishery Management Plan for Reef Fish Resources of the Gulf of Mexico set the initial red grouper allocation at 76 percent commercial to 24 percent recreational by using the sectors' respective landings data from 19862005. The recreational landings were based on the old Marine Recreational Fisheries

Statistics Survey. Even though those numbers were suspect, as indicated by a National Academy of Scientists report, they were all that was available "The best available science," as mandated under the Magnuson-Stevens Act. Those landings also incorporated the available data for discard mortality.