Bedlam broke out before sunrise on May 22 alongside the Canaveral Princess, a 90-foot charter boat that runs offshore fishing trips for groups of up to 75 anglers out of Port Canaveral.

It was supposed to be the first day of Florida’s biggest Atlantic red snapper season in years. Since 2010, recreational anglers had only been allowed to keep red snapper a day or two a year to give the population a chance to recover from overfishing. This year, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the season would stretch for 39 days — “an increase of more than 1,800 percent,” he boasted in a press release.

But around 10 p.m. the night before the snapper bonanza was set to start, the NOAA Marine Fisheries Service announced the season was canceled, citing a last-minute injunction from a federal judge in a lawsuit brought by commercial fishing companies.

At 5 a.m. the next morning, Christine Shaffer, who manages the Canaveral Princess, stood on the darkened dock to face her customers.

“It was a riot,” she said. “We had people screaming at us and acting like we knew this was going to happen.”

In fact, Shaffer was as blind-sided as her clients. Over the next few weeks, she said she lost more than $100,000 as disappointed customers refused to pay for trips without red snapper.

The anger didn’t end at the docks. Politicians in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, who had lobbied the Trump administration for permission to extend the snapper season, fumed about the lawsuit and the environmentalists and commercial fishing interests who supported it.

“For them, it’s not about conservation,” Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr wrote in a Facebook post. “They’re attempting to destroy fishing as we know it.”

Commercial fishermen and environmentalists responded with similar passion, arguing that a longer red snapper season would derail decades of effort to restore the fishery.

“You could have possibly caught fish this year, but in all likelihood there would be no fishing next year, or the year after, maybe the year after that, because the stock would have to be rebuilding again,” said Bob Zales, executive director of the Southeastern Fisheries Association, a commercial fishing group that sued to stop the Atlantic red snapper season.

At the heart of the conflict lies one deceptively difficult question: Just how many red snapper are there in the sea?

Getting the answer right could decide the fate of the red snapper, a bottom-dwelling fish cursed to be both delicious and very easy to catch, along with thousands of Floridians whose livelihoods depend on it.

This year, a team of scientists led by researchers at the University of Florida will publish the results of a new South Atlantic red snapper census that may raise their population estimates and change the duration of future fishing seasons.

The clock is ticking. Although this year’s snapper season ended before it started, state officials have vowed to appeal the decision. In the meantime, Florida created a workaround, announcing anglers could keep red snapper caught in state waters — even though the fish mostly live farther offshore in federal waters.

“We’re not going to be involved in policing the federal waters,” DeSantis said at a May 22 press conference. “We’re going to basically focus on ensuring folks are able to get out and do stuff in state waters.”

Meet the fish-counter-in-chief

Clay Porch looks like a guy you’d see holding up a giant fish in a photo framed on a dive bar wall. Tanned, bearded and clad in a Hawaiian shirt, he spent years diving for aquarium fish and spiny lobster and working on a charter boat fishing for marlin before joining the National Marine Fisheries Service.

These days, he counts fish. As the director of NOAA’s Southeast Fisheries Science Center, he oversees the team that estimates the South Atlantic red snapper population and sets annual catch limits, balancing the needs of fishermen with long-term stock recovery goals.

A lot of people don’t like his work. The Coastal Conservancy Association, which represents recreational anglers, called the federal government’s approach to South Atlantic red snapper “one of the most frustrating and exasperating fishery management debacles in the country.”

Anglers say they can’t avoid hooking red snapper when they fish offshore — but they have to throw them back all but one or two days a year because federal scientists say they’re too rare.

“They’re acting as if there’s only so many red snapper and that’s why they have these limits, but how can that be true?” said Shaffer, who operates the Canaveral Princess. “There’s not a day that boat goes out that they are not catching red snapper.”

Porch hears that criticism a lot. But he says scientists are doing their best with limited funding to answer a very hard question — and the data show the red snapper stock is still much lower than it has been for generations of anglers.

Federal scientists started counting fish during the Ulysses S Grant administration of the 1870s.

Even in the late 19th century, Florida fishermen noticed they had to go farther offshore to find red snapper and the fish they landed were getting smaller. Using the only data source available in their era, researchers hung around Gulf Coast docks and asked fishing crews what they caught each day to roughly track the red snapper stock.

Scientists at the National Marine Fisheries Service are still doing a version of that today. Officials wait on docks to ask recreational anglers what they caught and threw back, and they mail surveys to anglers’ homes to ask how many fishing trips they take a year.

Commercial fishing boats are required to report their catch every trip. Port agents measure some of the fish and collect their inner ear bones, which have growth rings like trees that allow scientists to estimate their ages.

Finally, federal scientists set up cameras and bait traps on a smattering of known red snapper habitats to count their numbers. And they do biological research to figure out how fertile the fish are at different ages and what percentage of them die after being hooked by an angler and tossed back in the water.

The data show the South Atlantic red snapper population has been recovering since the 1990s, when the fishery was reduced to 11 percent of its historic levels.

But Porch says the growing population is mostly young fish who haven’t hit their reproductive peak. And hundreds of thousands of them die every year when they’re caught and thrown back — killed by hooking injuries, sudden pressure changes and predators. About a quarter of released red snapper don’t make it.

NOAA estimates recreational anglers toss 500,000 of these “dead discards” a year. So many fish die this way that federal regulators only allow people to keep 22,787 more during short seasons to stay under the catch limit. The fact that dead discards outnumber landed fish 22 to 1 is a source of endless frustration for anglers — and suspicion from those who think NOAA is overestimating the number of red snapper who die after being hooked.

“Finding a way to turn those discards into landings is the key for keeping that fishery open longer,” Porch said.

Tools like descending devices, which sink snapper back into deep water and release them after they’re caught, can keep more discarded fish alive. But they can’t solve the whole problem, Porch said.

A secret snapper stock

From 2017 to 2021, scientists in the Gulf of Mexico demonstrated a new way to count fish that yielded a red snapper population estimate three times higher the official number from NOAA scientists.

At the same time, Gulf states got federal officials’ blessing to dramatically extend their recreational red snapper seasons, from three days in 2017 to 140 days this year, despite dire warnings from conservationists.

“We heard every argument under the sun: You’re going to crash the fishery. The sky is falling. You’re going to deplete the stock that we spent all these years recovering,” said Greg Stunz, the Texas A&M marine biology professor who led the “Great Red Snapper Count.”

So far, federal data shows the red snapper population is still growing in the western Gulf, but seems to be flagging in the eastern Gulf near Florida, according to NOAA.

Stunz said he suspects a similar census of the South Atlantic would also reveal many more red snapper than federal scientists estimate and support a much longer recreational fishing season.

To reach their estimate, Stunz and his team of more than 80 scientists used underwater cameras and drones to film and count red snapper on habitats from Brownsville, Texas, to Key West, Florida. Where muddy water made it impossible to see, the researchers used sound waves to spot fish. They also hooked, tagged and released red snapper and offered anglers rewards for returning the tags if the fish were caught again.

Five years and $12 million later, Stunz and co. came up with a very similar estimate to federal scientists for the number of red snapper living on well-known habitats such as reefs and oil rigs. But they discovered a huge, spread-out population of red snapper living in unmapped areas of the Gulf. Stunz said this hidden habitat holds two-thirds of all red snapper in the Gulf — raising the population from federal scientists’ estimate of 36 million fish to more than 118 million.

“We found the motherlode of red snapper where we didn’t know they existed,” Stunz said, adding, “of course there was a lot of controversy surrounding that because it didn’t match the feds’ numbers and the feds didn’t like it.”

Indeed, Porch disputes Stunz’s argument that finding more fish justifies much longer red snapper seasons.

Porch said the ongoing red snapper recovery in the Gulf has more to do with longstanding federal catch limits and the decline of the local shrimping industry, which means fewer snapper are getting caught in trawl nets. He said the higher population estimate means the Gulf has been relying on a massive, hidden hatchery of snapper moms to lay enough eggs to replace the fish that are already being caught by anglers.

“We used to think red snapper were like the rabbits of the sea,” Porch said. But it turns out they don’t reproduce that fast. “There’s just a lot more of them than we thought.”

The fight for Florida’s snapper season

Now, one of the scientists from Stunz’s Great Red Snapper Count team is leading a new stock assessment in the South Atlantic.

The project, run by University of Florida professor Will Patterson, used camera traps and drones to count fish on snapper habitats from Florida to North Carolina. Researchers also caught 14,085 fish along the coast and tested their DNA to see how closely related they were. Smaller populations tend to be more closely related than bigger populations.

Patterson didn’t respond to multiple interview requests, but a NOAA spokesperson said the project’s results would go through peer review in December. Patterson’s group published a report in April that showed a very wide range of uncertainty, with plausible estimates ranging from about 1 million to about 10 million red snapper in the South Atlantic. Federal scientists peg the number around 2 million.

The final report may or may not support a longer recreational red snapper season. But Florida has made clear it will look for ways to extend the season regardless. Hours after a federal judge halted this year’s federal red snapper season, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission posted on X that it would launch a state season “to ensure our anglers can get out on the water as planned beginning this weekend.”

Florida is appealing the ruling, and if it’s overturned, the state will snap the extended red snapper season back in place, the X post said.

The fight isn’t over, according to Andrea Treece, an attorney for Earthjustice, an environmental group that supported the lawsuit to block the start of snapper season.

Although a judge already ruled that the federal government and southeastern states tried to improperly use “exempted fishing permits” (EFPs) to extend the red snapper season this year, Treece said the states may come back with a new legal strategy to extend the season next year. She’s pushing for a more conclusive ruling against the states.

“If the court says, ‘Not only were you not supposed to do this this summer, but you cannot permit this to happen under any future EFP,’ that would be more definitive,” Treece said.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission declined to answer emailed questions about how the state determined this year’s red snapper season should be 39 days long and what the state’s plans are for future red snapper season. 

Spokesperson Pebbles Causseaux said the state is surveying anglers to track how many red snapper they’ve caught and kept this year, but the data “is preliminary and not yet available.”

In years past, recreational anglers have hit the annual red snapper catch limit in one weekend of fishing. This summer’s state season ran from May 22 to July 31, and the fall season will open Sept. 1.

“They’ve been fishing since Memorial Day weekend, so they’ve probably blown through that limit a couple times over if they’re fishing as hard as they could be,” Treece said.

The legal limbo has been frustrating for Shaffer, who manages the Canaveral Princess. She said private anglers and other charter boat operators are landing red snapper in federal territory and pretending they came from state waters.

“They’re not even hiding it,” she said. “They’re posting it all over social media.”

Some of her customers are demanding she do the same. But Shaffer won’t break the rules, even though it’s costing her business.

“You’ve got the president, the governor, all trying to say, ‘Yeah, go for it,’ but that doesn’t help people like us that are in business here 365 days of the year,” Shaffer said. “We’ve got a federal fishing permit that we have to abide by, and we can’t go out and break the law like everybody else.”

Nicolás Rivero is an environmental accountability reporter at The Florida Trib. He can be reached at nicolas.rivero@floridatrib.org.