You can read my thoughts in the next Fishing News mag. My main point and the easiest fix is to make commercial snapper fishing a hook and line fishery. I have spoken to snapper longline commercial fishers who say that they have little wastage and certainly no need to dump fish. They can target species and even fish by size for the market and release unwanted fish. It has to be the way to go.
The 25cm commercial limit is ridiculous if we are going to increase recreational length limits.
What use is a 25cm snapper? Soup fish? Get a life, a snapper is better off being allowed to grow to a useful size if you eat them, and trophy size if you just want to catch them.
I saw snapper ( about 50) in a fish market in Hawaii. They were labelled "New Zealand Snapper", not one of those would have been over 25 cms.
I asked where they came from and was told New Zealand. The fishmonger said that was the size his customers wanted and that they would not buy bigger ones. Think about that for a minute.
30 cms is a fair size but do we know enough about what size we should be harvesting? Australia has slotting in some areas, seems to work for them.
A 40cm snapper would be a good eating size I reckon. Have they spawned before reaching that size? How many times? Is it a good size to remove from the fishery? Do we know these things. How detrimental is it to take a snapper over 80cms? Would that harm the fishery or are they past spawning?
I think there is a lot more we need to know before messing with this too much. It matters not who is catching the 25cm snapper if they are the ones that need to stay in the fishery.