Who Regulates Red Snapper and Other Fishes in the Gulf of Mexico?
The commercial and recreational fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) off Louisiana are regulated by the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries in state waters (out to 3 nautical miles (nm)) and by the federal government in the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ: from 3 to 200 nm). Alabama and Mississippi also enforce a 3 nm state waters limit, but state waters extend out 9 nm off Florida and Texas. Since red snapper are a relatively deep-water fish, most of the harvest off Louisiana comes from the EEZ. In nearly every instance, Louisiana state regulations applied to red snapper mirror the federal regulations, as they have historically, to make enforcement both simpler and fairer. The recent actions in Texas and Florida to establish more liberal red snapper regulations within their state waters have generated a great deal of controversy – in particular, because of those states’ 9-nm boundaries for state waters. However troubling these actions are, it should be noted that the 9-nm boundaries of
