“At this point, the data do not support opening even a limited fishery,” he says. research at Florida State University, say their recovery has faced setbacks in recent years and that their numbers are still too low to justify lifting the ban. “Just because we’ve been doing something for 30 years doesn’t mean we need to keep doing it the same way.” His point of view is supported by many fishermen, who claim goliath groupers are a scourge whose growing populations need to be knocked down so they stop picking off other sportfish.īut many marine scientists, including Christopher Malinowski, a conservation biologist who studied goliath groupers during his Ph.D. “We should applaud our successes,” said FWC Chairman Rodney Barreto in a May press release, in which he argued the ban has been in place long enough. Photograph by David Doubilet, Nat Geo Image Collection Right: A goliath grouper swims through the Castor shipwreck, off Boynton Beach, Florida. Three years ago, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the scientific body that evaluates the global conservation status of species, improved the goliath grouper’s status from critically endangered to vulnerable. Still, most scientists agree the species is recovering, but populations are not yet where they should be.

It’s hard to establish how many goliath groupers there are in Florida waters because fish are hard to count. The decision to open the discussion, however, has sparked fierce debate. “For a variety of reasons, some fishermen want harvest to be allowed, including desires for reduced interactions with goliath while fishing, opportunities to harvest a very large fish, and belief that harvest access should not be restricted indefinitely.”

“Goliath groupers have continued to increase in abundance since the fishery was closed in 1990,” reads a statement the commission emailed to National Geographic. Nonetheless, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), which regulates hunting and fishing in the state, announced in May that it’s considering lifting the ban. In Florida, where they’re mainly concentrated on reefs around the southern coast, fishing for the species hasn’t been allowed since 1990. Until 2018, goliath groupers were classified as critically endangered throughout their range, in tropical and subtropical Atlantic waters, in large part because of overfishing. But their gargantuan size offers little protection against the proposed lifting of Florida’s fishing ban for this threatened species. These fish, named goliath groupers after the giant of Biblical legend, can reach more than eight feet long and weigh over 800 pounds. The largest grouper in the Atlantic Ocean is so big that it can eat a four-foot-long shark in one gulp and makes noises so loud that nearby scuba divers feel an effect much like a sonic boom.

Florida grouper fish