The News Herald
Panama City, Florida
November 6, 2003

A New Idea to Snap Up

By Kathryn C. Viatella and Pamela B. Baker

Last weekend, the prized red snapper fishery shut down and will be off limits to sportsmen until late April. This is bad news for anglers and coastal economies because good fishing is a major reason tourists flock to the Gulf of Mexico during the winter and spring. We need a better, more localized way to manage fisheries that provide fishermen the flexibility they need and rewards conservation to ensure healthy fish stocks.

Six years ago, federal regulators imposed annual season closures on "overfished" red snapper to keep sport catches in lime with the 4.5 million pound quota. As the fishing seasons started to shrink, regulators dropped the bag limit to four fish and raised the minimum size limit to 16 inches to slow the pace of fishing and keep anglers on the water as long as possible.

Unfortunately, these steps intended to help red snapper have pushed fishermen into a destructive "catch and release" fishery in which 50 percent of the red snapper catch is thrown overboard and millions of fish die from stress and predation by dolphins and sharks. Under this system, red snapper stocks will continue to falter and even stricter limits for sportsmen are probably unavoidable.

Understandably, anglers are appalled. They want to fish and practice good conservation. Fortunately, several new ideas are on the table.

Under one promising concept, federal and state regulators would share management authority with local community-based groups of fishermen. This idea stems from a recent trend in fishery management in which regulators set safe catch levels and protect special habitats, but fishermen manage the catch to reduce conflicts and improve compliance.

This approach would require cooperation among anglers, who would create "angling management organizations" or AMOs. The concept of recreational AMOs is like the successful "community development quota" program implemented in the North Pacific region. Fishery managers assigned a portion of the annual commercial harvest of the pollock, halibut, and sablefish catch directly to coalitions of Alaskan fishing villages in the Bering Sea. Each coalition in turn, allocated the assigned catch among its members and helps enforce fishing rules. The program has fostered greater participation in management of the fisheries and improved conservation by reducing by-catch.

In the gulf region, a group of for-hire operators, a coalition of fishing clubs from several communities, or a national organization with membership dispersed over a large area could organize an AMO. Each AMO would share management responsibility with the region's fishery managers and regulators—the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council and the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Eligible AMOs would receive a fixed share of the recreational quota and a substantial amount of flexibility to manage their fish. For example, in Florida, members of one AMO may decide to time fishing with the busy summer season, while another may choose prime "snow bird" and spring break months. Or, an AMO might decide to set a six or seven fish bag limit while another allocates fish to its members by lottery. The consequences of exceeding the quota or damaging the fishery would be a reduction or loss of shares.

Fishermen, regulators, community and business leaders, and environmentalists will find AMOs attractive because they build on sportmen's natural desire to conserve fish and create incentives to comply with rules. The Gulf Council should test an experimental AMO. The basic principles are already on the table, the time is right to customize fishing rules to meet local needs.

Viatella, an economist, and Baker, a fisheries biologist, are with the public interest group Environmental Defense, in Corpus Christi, Texas.