As shown on a "Just a Conservation Minute" feature on Florida Sportsman TV, four out of five balls representing all red grouper catches are taken by industrial commercial interests, even though recreational anglers are in the vast majortiy and generate more economic benefits, including jobs.

Florida anglers are fit to be tied, as the saying goes, over a sudden federal proposal to cut the red grouper bag limit from two to one and close down all recreational fishing for the popular species for up to four months.

The cutback would be a crushing blow to grouper fishing, especially off the west coast, where the reds are a mainstay for many thousands of anglers.

Sportfishing groups and individuals are protesting against the proposal to officials on all levels and calling for the general public to mount major opposition.

The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) announced the suggested cutbacks on non-commercial red grouper takes on the basis of a highly suspect research claim that recreationals caught nearly 2.4 times more red grouper last year than in 2003.

A series of hearings and meetings are under way (see www.floridasportsman.com).

The new estimated catch based on federal dock samplings and phone surveys has drawn fire from many because no such increase has been reported before, and because no similar increase occurred in data from charter and head boats.

Normally, such a spike in the data would cause no immediate reaction, but because red grouper is an “overfished” species and subject to a 10-year rebuilding plan (starting in 2003), the feds are scrambling to get the recreational portion of the total allowable catch back “in line.” Under the 10-year plan, commercial and recreational landings must not exceed a set number in the first three years. Thus, the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council’s objective is to knock down recreational landings in 2005 and level out a 3-year average.

That would be reasonable if the numbers were believable, but as Ted Forsgren of Coastal Conservation Association Florida (CCA) said, “The problem with the [2004 increase] is that nothing even remotely close to that has ever happened in the 16-year history of managing red grouper.”

Moreover, the Council’s data shows that private individuals—not licensed charterboats or headboats—supposedly accounted for the greatest increases in 2004 recreational catches.

“If I believed the numbers, and if everyone else believed the numbers, I’d be the first one to say we have to do something—we really need to look at this,” said Dennis O’Hern, president of the Fishing Rights Alliance (FRA), a recreational fishing and conservation advocacy group. “However, I believe and a lot of people believe that those numbers are artificially high.”

Also, consider last year’s weather woes. Rather than spending more time catching more fish, Florida anglers were too busy entertaining a quartet of rude visitors named Charlie, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne. But if we are to understand the feds correctly, we intrepid Floridians managed to more than double our red grouper catches during a year that saw the state’s most destructive hurricane season in recent history.

Now you can’t drain the ocean and count fish, nor are you likely to identify every single red grouper catch in a given year. Therefore “estimated” data is always an assumption that we just have to live with. But in the case at hand, it seems we could replace “estimated” with “wild guess” and remain in the same ballpark.

It’s not that the computational methods used by NMFS are necessarily wrong—it’s just that the data is sketchy and suspect.

The numbers come from dockside intercept surveys, which estimate catch amounts, and household telephone surveys aimed at estimating fishing effort. With the former, the feds hire private contractors to visit recreational boats, weigh fish and gather catch details. Phone surveys, done via random dialing, typically garner low responses, so surveyors simply hammer away on the phones until they get enough confirmed fishing trips to satisfy their minimum data set.

Bob Bryant of St. Petersburg is a charter captain and an actuarial analyst for the life insurance industry. His number crunching experience tells him something is greatly amiss.

“The models are not flawed, but it’s like the old computer adage ‘garbage in, garbage out,’” he said. “You can have the best models in the world, but if your data is tainted, the results will be incorrect.

“Whenever performing experiments on data, all statisticians are trained to question results that reside far outside the norm. I, for one, would not have certified these results and would have sent them back to the data collectors for further review. Management decisions are to be based on ‘best available science’ as stated in the Magnuson/Stevens Act. This set of data is not the ‘best available science’.”