Could A New Redfish War Emerge?

Did you know for the last 20 years there has been a contingent of commercial anglers wanting to make the redfish a commercially harvested species again?

To look at where the future of redfish is heading, it is necessary to first take a brief look at the past.

For many years, commercial fishermen targeted redfish heavily with gill nets, purse seines, and other highly effective tools. Fisheries agencies even allowed recreational anglers to use gill nets in Texas to catch reds and other popular fishes. My dad used to run a gill net when he was a kid and talked about catching entire schools of fish at a time. Now it seems like a waste, but back then that was the way people did things.  By the 1970’s, the American public fell in love with redfish, partly because of New Orleans Chef Paul Prudhomme’s famous “blackened redfish” recipe.

The result was that redfish populations were ravaged, and recreational fishermen experienced terrible fishing conditions.

A group of concerned coastal anglers fought to get the redfish classified as a game fish and therefore protected from commercial harvest. Many outdoor writers call those days the “redfish wars,” which spawned the Gulf Coast Conservation Association (GCCA), now Coastal Conservation Association (CCA).

The banning of commercial redfish harvest along with aggressive stocking efforts spearheaded by the then Gulf Coast Conservation Association (GCCA) and the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department (TPWD) gave the redfish population a much-needed boost. At the time of this writing, Texas has stocked more than 100,000,000 redfish fingerlings into coastal bay systems and estuaries. TPWD officials also placed a slot limit on redfish that protected the mature breeding specimens (bull reds) from harvest.

By the early 1990’s, redfish numbers had stabilized and recreational fishermen started catching lots of them. In fact, by 1994 redfish numbers got so high that TPWD biologists decided it was okay for anglers to harvest a couple of bull redfish each year. TPWD initiated a special red drum “trophy tag.”  Fast forward to the 2000s.

Now, redfish are super abundant with record numbers reported in bay systems along the Gulf Coast. Anglers are enjoying a redfish renaissance of sorts.  But there are reasons to be concerned.

For example there is a contingent of anglers in Louisiana who say redfish are responsible for causing severe declines in the number and average size of blue crabs in the marshes of Louisiana. I am sure it is not the hundreds of thousands of crab traps in their marshes.

It must be the redfish, right?   Back in 2001, the Red Drum Advisory Panel (RDAP) of the Gulf of Mexico Fisheries Management Council (GMFMC) asked federal fisheries managers to consider a “limited commercial season” for redfish. They passed on it the first time, but a similar proposal came up in 2015.  Redfish stocks may indeed be able to sustain a commercial harvest, and to be perfectly fair, those fish do not belong to sport fishermen or anyone else for that matter–they are supposed to be a public resource.

On the other hand, sport anglers are the ones who paid for redfish restoration through saltwater stamp sales, and funded massive stocking programs that increased overall numbers of the fish in Texas and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast. Sport fishermen have lived with restrictive redfish limits to help bolster this magnificent fish. The last time the commercial fishermen had a go with redfish, they nearly fished them into oblivion. That is not an opinion, but a documented fact.  These proposals keep popping up but never see the light of day. Numerous other issues are taking up the time and resources of NMFS, and support for redfish conservation is still high among conservation groups and state fish and game agencies Only time will tell whether we will see another round of the redfish wars that dominated the coastal fishing scene of the 1970’s. If the battles do start, hopefully the redfish will come out of the winner once again.  This awesome fish certainly deserves it.