Will cobia be the next red snapper fiasco?

Each spring, the hunt begins. Boats glide along local shorelines. Fisherman stand watch on the boats, keeping keen eyes peeled for the elusive large, dark shapes migrating west in the clear waters of the Gulf Coast.
It’s cobia season and sight fishing is the only way to find these seasonal visitors.
Most local cobia fishermen will tell you there are good and bad years in terms of the number of fish seen and caught. As both the number of boats on the water and the number of cobia tournaments increase, it’s hard for anglers to deny there has been an increased pressure on the fish.
Unlike red snapper, which make their year-round home on wrecks and artificial reefs off our coast, cobia is a member of the pelagic family of fish. Because they travel great distances, calculating their population is difficult for both fishermen and fisheries experts.
Whether or not the increased pressure has affected the population of the fish has not been scientifically determined due to insufficient stock research, but cobia researchers like Michael Osterling of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science are trying to make sure there will be a plan of attack if it is ever determined that over-fishing cobia has become a problem.
Osterling and other researchers at VIMS have been tagging cultured juvenile cobia since 1997 for release in the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia and other spots on the East Coast. According to Osterling, not a lot is known about the movement of the young fish because they aren’t targeted, but VIMS researchers believe their program is important in determining if stocked fish can survive in the wild.
“We need to be prepared,” he said. “We need to look forward and say this could be an issue (overfishing) and need to be able to say ‘we can do this’ and ‘no, we can’t do this’.
“We want to be in a position where cultured cobia could be used as a tool.”
VIMS started the program as a way to help create an aquaculture food source by spawning cobia in captivity. But the focus of the program was changed several years ago to stock enhancement and to function as a tool to monitor their life-span.
In the United States, cobia migrate in the Gulf of Mexico from the Florida Keys in the winter to the Mississippi Delta in the late spring to spawn. On the east coast, the fish migrate from South Florida in the winter to Northern Virginia in the summer. The fish can be found worldwide in areas of warm water.
Because the fish migrates close to the coast in the Florida Panhandle during the spring, it is a prime target for recreational and professional fishermen due to its size and distinct taste.
Destin fishing captain John Holley, who has fished for cobia for more than 30 years, said he hasn’t noticed a drop in the numbers, just a change in conditions from year to year that make it easier or harder to find the fish.
“I’ve seen the cobia come and go,” he said. “You get a good year like last year and then you have a lot of people wondering if they are going.”