12/25/2022 0 Comments Red snapper season texasThe Great Red Snapper Count refers to this catch-all habitat category as “uncharacterized bottom.” And it is home to most of the Gulf’s red snapper. These refuges can be anything small rock formations, shipwrecks, cargo containers that fall off ships, oil and gas infrastructure, undiscovered banks. Interspersed across the sweeping sandy and muddy bottoms of the Gulf’s floor are uncharted anomalies that attract red snapper. However, the vast unknown of the ocean floor, earth’s final frontier, provides countless habitat that is unmapped and often unexplored by humans. Researchers found plenty of fish where they expected to, like natural banks and artificial reefs. Perhaps more surprising than the revelation of an abundance that is triple what was previously known is where these fish were found. Stunz added that the tagging component of the study is more proof that practicing catch-and-release can work in this fishery. I mean, six percent is off-the-charts good,” said project leader Greg Stunz, the Harte Research Institute’s chair for Fisheries and Ocean Health and director of the Sportfish Center at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi. “We had a 30 percent return rate of our tagged fish, which is off-the-charts good. The results of this citizen science were far greater than anticipated. Anglers got $250 for tags and could get up to $500 from double tags. Thousands of snapper were tagged, some double tagged, to be returned for rewards. One of the greatest success stories from this study is the tagging component, which involved recreational and commercial anglers in the count. Researchers used remotely operated underwater vehicles, cameras towed behind boats, bioacoustics and other fieldwork to count snapper across the Gulf. That’s somewhat of an even split between the western and eastern Gulf, with larger fish found out west. Texas has 23 million, Louisiana has 29 million, the combined tiny coasts of Mississippi and Alabama have 10 million and the expansive Florida seaboard holds 48 million red snapper. The independent study found an astounding number of snapper across the entire Gulf Coast. Fish aged two years and older were tallied in the Great Red Snapper Count. The project’s report, released Wednesday, approximates a population of 110 million red snapper in the Gulf, over three times more than the 36 million estimated by a 2018 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration stock assessment.
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