I attended last Monday's workshop in Lake Worth, which was added to the schedule after complaints that FWC was not holding any workshops on this issue in Palm Beach County, the mecca of goliath grouper dive tourism. Otherwise Palm Beach residents would not have been able to voice an opinion until the October meetings in Stuart and Davie. Judging from the "clicker" questionnaire at the end, about 80-85% of the attendees were recreational divers opposed to any opening on goliath grouper. It will be interesting to see how those numbers vary in different regions; last week there were three meetings in the Keys and the next round will be in the northwest portion of the state (Crystal River, Carrabelle, Pensacola, and Panama City).
The currently proposed plan included the following points, which could be subject to change as the public comment process goes on:
- A tag system, possibly to be decided by lottery, for which the state can charge up to $300 per tag (any more would require an act of the Florida Legislature).
- Anglers would only be able to obtain one tag, which would allow them to take one fish in the year of issue. These tags would possibly be regionally limited (i.e., you get a tag for the Panhandle, you can't go take a fish in the Keys)
- 100 tags would be issued per year for four years.
- Recreational hook-and-line fishing only; no commercial or spearfishing take.
- No sale or consumption of the fish; carcasses would have to be handed over to FWC.
- A slot limit of 47-67 inches total length.
- Not sure I recall what the proposed limits on fishing during the spawning aggregations was, but I believe there will be temporal/spatial restrictions to avoid taking fish from aggregations.
Overall, I have to say I was not sold on the idea and I got the definite impression the FWC staff were presenting this plan because they were instructed to at the commissioners' meeting back in February - not because they themselves were in favor of it. One line of discussion revolved around the rationale that this will help collect more data (there have been three attempts since 2004 to conduct a stock assessment for goliath grouper, all of which were rejected for use by NMFS). The staffers kept returning to a lack of data on what the maximum age is for goliath grouper; however as a number of commenters pointed out the current proposal is for a slot limit which is capped at 67 inches total length. When asked why there was a slot limit the FWC staff answered that it was to protect the largest, most productive breeders. All well and good, but now you've shot your "for science" rationale in the foot and that sounds suspiciously like testing the waters for a "sustainable" long-term take. I will also note that Dr. Chris Koenig's team at Florida State University, which does much of the goliath grouper tagging and research up in Palm Beach County, is opposed to this idea.
I walked out of that meeting with the impression that this is about throwing the fishing interests a bone and cracking open the door to allowing a regular recreational/commercial take again. There were a few representatives of the fishing community present; one trotted out the discredited idea that "they're eating all the fish off the reef" (less than 1% of their diet is snapper and grouper; they mostly eat crustaceans and small baitfish) and our own former poster dumpsterDiver made a statement that was almost Steve Zissou's "revenge" rationale from "The Life Aquatic" - stating that unless fishermen are allowed to have a whack at the goliaths, they're going to start killing them out of spite. To be fair, several of the anti-fishing crowd present said some things that left me rolling my eyes as well.
Short form - I think this is a bad idea. I don't subscribe to the hyperbole that this will reverse the goliath grouper recovery in one stroke, but FWC has clearly made a political decision to pursue this without science to back it up and it could open the door to over-exploitation later. While goliaths are fairly thick near their major aggregation sites (Zion Train has about 30 residents year-round, which swells to about 200 during an aggregation), in my experience they're still uncommon sights in other parts of South Florida and according to federal data they have not recovered in other parts of their range. The meat on the larger individuals is considered unsafe for consumption, so commercially they're worthless and recreationally you can already catch and release them (you just can't pose with a dead fish back at the dock). This proposal is driven by fishermen who see them as a nuisance; my take is that they're going to have to get used to the competition as the big predators (groupers and sharks) get back to healthy numbers.
