Starting today, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries will enforce several new limits on catching red drum in an attempt to curb overfishing. LDWF Director of Marine Fisheries Chris Schieble says the new regulations aren’t anything too crazy.
“Formerly, you could go out and catch red [drum] fish and keep five,” he explains. “That will be dropped to a bagging limit of four.”
Additionally, caught red drum now must be between 18 and 27 inches. Schieble says there are also new rules for whether or not the captain and crew on charter on for-hire trips can catch and keep red drum.
“They can still fish for the instructions of the customers,” he says. “So they can teach them how to cast a whatever, a popping cork or a topwater or whatever they’re doing. He [the captain] just can’t keep a [red drum] fish if he catches one.”
These limits are in place to get the population of red drum back up after LDWF found signs of overfishing, such as not enough juvenile fish making it back to spawning areas. Luckily, Schieble says, it shouldn’t take too long for red drum to bounce back, since “[t]he critical value of getting the escapement rate back to where we need it should take place fairly quickly.”
LDWF estimates the red drum population will recover in three to five years with these regulations in place.
