Three state fisheries agencies have gone back to NOAA Fisheries with a second attempt to run their own Atlantic red snapper seasons, eleven weeks after a federal judge shut the first attempt down hours before it was due to open.
The National Marine Fisheries Service published notice on 10 August that it had received exempted fishing permit applications from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources and the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources. All three were filed on 10 July. Written comments close on 25 August.
The numbers in the applications are specific. Florida has asked for a harvest limit of 185,379 red snapper, South Carolina for 19,253 and Georgia for 10,759. Each state derived its figure from the 509,000-fish total annual catch limit set under Secretarial Amendment 59, after subtracting commercial landings and an estimated 463,033 recreational dead discards - fish released that are not expected to survive.
North Carolina, which held a permit under the blocked 2026 round, did not apply this time. It has asked NMFS for a conventional federal-waters recreational season instead.
The permits are pitched as data projects rather than as a simple season extension. The states want to test mandatory and voluntary electronic reporting, quantify how many anglers actually target the species, and collect biological samples. NMFS notes in the filing that the percent standard error on recreational red snapper harvest estimates is high, "indicating low precision and significant uncertainty."
That is the crux of a fight that has run for years. Federal recreational seasons in the South Atlantic have recently been squeezed to one or two days.
"South Atlantic red snapper is not a stock in jeopardy," the American Sportfishing Association and the Coastal Conservation Association said in a joint statement after the May ruling. "Anglers and managers have worked for years to rebuild this fishery, and those efforts have been wildly successful. The latest stock assessment confirms what anglers see on the water - the Atlantic red snapper stock is as abundant now as ever."
The two groups argued the compressed seasons had produced "excessive discard mortality estimates and a derby-style fishery that results in foregone yield, poses safety risks, and erodes public confidence."
The first round collapsed on 21 May, when the US District Court for the District of Columbia granted a preliminary injunction in Southeastern Fisheries Association v. Lutnick. Commercial fishing interests had sued over the permits NMFS approved on 1 May. Florida's 39-day season was due to start the following morning.
"All recreational fishing under these South Atlantic EFPs is not authorized, including tomorrow's start date of May 22, 2026, for Florida's recreational red snapper season," NOAA Fisheries said at the time. "Contact your state agency for further details."
Conservation groups that filed an amicus brief in the case read the science very differently.
"We know that overfishing almost wiped out red snapper populations," said Earthjustice senior attorney Andrea Treece. "That's why years of science and agreements set up a framework to make sure there's enough snapper year-to-year. It's not smart to play politics like this with our shared public resources."
Ocean Conservancy's senior director of fish conservation, Meredith Moore, welcomed the injunction but was blunt about what came next. "The injunction offers the first real hope that we might prevent overfishing from driving red snapper back into decline," she said. "With no season length, no estimate on catch, and no guarantees that fishing will be restricted to state waters, Florida's plan risks putting us right back to what led to this lawsuit in the first place."
Ocean Conservancy's own arithmetic put the recreational annual catch limit at 22,797 fish and noted that a recent two-day Florida season alone landed 24,885. Scaling that rate across a 39-day season, the group estimated as many as 485,000 fish could be taken - more than twenty times the limit.
There is also a disagreement about what a lot of small fish means. Anglers report seeing red snapper everywhere. Ocean Conservancy fisheries scientist Dr Michael Drexler says that is the wrong signal to read.
"It's not intuitive because we associate fertility with a certain limited age range, but elsewhere in the animal kingdom, that's not how it works," Drexler said. "Older fish are the backbone of a healthy fish population because they produce more eggs, spawn more reliably, and help stabilize populations during environmental change, so seeing more young fish in the water is a good thing but not the signal we should be looking at for the long term."
The rebuilding plan for the stock runs through 2044. Commercial harvest in South Atlantic federal waters opened on 13 July against a 102,951-pound annual catch limit and is unaffected by the state applications.