The last time Captain Richard Rutland attempted to fish for snook, he had to travel nearly 11 hours from Mobile, Alabama, to the tropical waters of Everglades National Park, in south Florida. That was one of the nearest places he could hope to find such a fish, known for fighting hard on the hook. Lately, though, it’s looking like Rutland can stay closer to home: snook and other warm-water fish are finding their way north, and showing up on social media along the way.
Tropical fish like snook, bonefish, and permit have been showing up more often in states like Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Photo of Mobile Bay, Alabama, by Stephen Hinds / Outdoor Alabama.
“We caught a PERMIT while fishing for sheepshead with nightcrawlers,” a Mississippi angler recently posted on Facebook. “We thought I had caught a state record, not because it was huge but because this fish is so rare for MS waters.”
“To say I was SHOCKED today would be an understatement,” another fisherman recently posted. “Not only did we catch double digit pompano numbers but we managed to land this Alabama bonefish!”
People are swapping stories and sharing photos of new fish, sometimes asking for help identifying fish they’ve never seen before. And this has researchers intrigued.
Tropical fish like snook, bonefish, and permit have been showing up more often in states like Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, shattering previous size records and sometimes establishing completely new ones.
Unlike the clear tropical waters of southern Florida, most of the northern Gulf Coast is characterized by dark, nutrient-rich rivers that transition into salt marshes before entering the Gulf. Those estuaries provide habitat for shrimp, crabs, birds, fish, oysters, and other animals and plants.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the region contains 16 major estuarine systems. Historically, it has also been incredibly productive. This “Fertile Fisheries Crescent,” provides livelihoods for thousands of people along the coast.
However, the recent arrival of new species, due to the “tropicalization” of the waters, has researchers looking into what impact they will have on native plants and animals. There’s also concern as to what happens to more temperate water species, such as Gulf oysters, spotted seatrout, and flounder, as climate change continues to warm the ocean. That’s because, unlike species along the east or west coasts, Gulf species can’t go any farther north.
“We’re still kind of teasing all that stuff apart,” says Charlie Martin, a marine sciences professor at the University of South Alabama. “New species moving in might have an impact on the resident flora and fauna.”
While it is unclear what this might mean for native fisheries, researchers have examples along the Florida peninsula, where mangroves have slowly been creeping up for decades. There, once-productive oyster beds are nearly completely covered by mangroves. Researchers are also worried about the possibility of tropical fish outcompeting or replacing the more temperate species of the northern Gulf Coast.
Common snook, for example, a sportfish once rare along the northern Gulf Coast, have been showing up more often in off the coast of Louisiana, Alabama, and the Florida Panhandle.
“State folks are looking at putting a size limit on snook now, since we’ve had the state record, two years in a row, broken,” Martin says. “There are fishermen over in Baldwin County that now target snook. I never believed I’d see that in my lifetime.”
Richard Rutland, a long-time inshore charter captain with Cold Blooded Fishing, says that the first time he heard about a bonefish being caught in Alabama was around five years ago. Not long after, reports of snook began to filter in.
Charlie Martin with a snook he caught in 2022 in Crystal River, Florida. Martin will soon begin work to survey populations of snook and glean more information about where exactly the fish are coming from when they head north. Photo courtesy of Chris Martin.
“They are definitely starting to show up in our area. The other thing to think about in my opinion is we’ve not really had a cold winter in a while. We’ve had short periods of cold, but not like a cold, cold winter in a while,” he said. Rutland added that if the area was to experience a particularly chilly freeze, then the number of snook in the area would probably fall off for a bit.
Reports of permit, another tropical fish, have started coming in along the northern Gulf Coast in recent years, though Rutland thinks they may have been here longer and simply been misidentified earlier as pompano. “That’s one that kind of slides by sometimes because they look very similar,” he says.
In June, a fisherman broke the Mississippi state record for permit. In Alabama, the record was broken in 2022, and in Louisiana, a record permit was caught in 2020. It was only added as an official category in the state in 2018.
Martin and a team from the university and nearby Dauphin Island Sea Lab will soon begin work to survey populations of snook and glean more information about where exactly the fish are coming from and if temperatures have gotten so mild that they’re overwintering in the area.
The anecdotal evidence tracks with other trends. In March, a study released in Scientific Reports found that the number of juvenile bull sharks in Mobile Bay, Alabama, has increased fivefold over almost two decades. The increase correlated with rising temperatures in the bay. The warmer water provides better nursery conditions for the sharks and allows them to stay in the bay longer, before setting off for deeper water during the winter.
Another recent study, tracking increasing temperatures, was more concerning. The northern Gulf of Mexico is home to the last largescale wild oyster harvest in the United States, providing around 70 percent of the nation’s wild caught oysters. For decades, the oyster reefs along the coast, as in other parts of the world, have been in decline. Apalachicola Bay, Florida, which once produced around 10 percent of the country’s wild oysters, was closed to harvest in 2020. The fishery collapsed due to a number of reasons, including hurricanes, changes in salinity levels, and overfishing. Rising temperatures may have also been to blame.
The study found that oyster reproduction declined significantly in Apalachicola and Mobile bays during years with heatwaves that lasted 11 or more consecutive days. Prolonged exposure to continuous warm weather resulted in much fewer oyster larvae during those years. The region is expected to see more of those types of heatwaves moving forward, according to NOAA.
While researchers suspect some fish may be able to migrate to deeper waters as the Gulf Coast heats up, oysters won’t have that option. Instead, reefs along the Gulf may start to look like those found further south, in Tampa, Florida. Less than a century ago, that area was home to around 2,000 acres of oyster beds; today, it has just 171 acres. A study by the University of South Florida found that from 1938 to 2020, around 83 percent of the area’s oyster reefs were taken over by mangroves.
“Mangroves are moving up both sides of the Gulf of Mexico,” says Kenneth Heck, professor of marine sciences at the University of South Alabama. Mangroves have firmly established themselves on the Chandeleur Islands in Louisiana and steadily marched up Florida’s Big Bend and Panhandle areas. More recently, they’ve been found on Horn Island, off the coast of Mississippi.
“The only state far as I know that has no mangrove is Alabama,” Heck says, “but I’ve been expecting that to show up any time.” Black mangroves, which are more cold-tolerant than other types of mangroves found in the Gulf of Mexico, are outcompeting salt marsh plants as they migrate north.
While mangroves have historically tried to take hold as far north as Louisiana, they were usually beaten back by especially cold weather during winters. That’s changing too.
“What’s different now is that these species are staying,” Heck says. “They’re overwintering, if you want to call it that. And that’s reminiscent of what’s happening with some of the tropical fish species that we find up here,” including the mangrove snapper. “It’s not just a straight-line trajectory. Just because we still get some cold winters, and it only takes one cold night to knock things back. It’s not really the mean—the average. It’s the extremes that matter.”
Mangrove snapper have long appeared along the northern Gulf Coast during summertime, but they’re now being caught more and more during the winter.
If the current trends continue, the central Gulf Coast could look very different: black mangroves could move in first, followed by less cold-tolerant red mangroves, both replacing salt marshes that have flourished here for thousands of years.
There is also a worry that a transitional period between the establishment of black and red mangroves could affect fisheries and local species. Black mangroves provide far less cover and nursery habitat for small fish and shrimp than salt marshes or red mangroves, because they sit higher along the shore. So until red mangroves colonize the area, many species could be left without much cover and nursery habitat. That’s a question researchers are working to answer.
“I think we could see considerable change in the next 10 to 15 years if temperatures continue to rise,” Martin says. “One, we could see more tropical species moving in and two, we could see more of the subtropical and temperate species moving either offshore or losing them altogether. Because again, they can’t really go any farther north.”
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