Passport to Texas

This is Passport to Texas

With a 365 day season and four fish daily bag limit, red snapper is popular among recreational Gulf anglers in TX. Abundant in Texas waters, Parks and Wildlife employs various tools to monitor snapper populations.

05- We have bag seines, gill nets, and creel surveys–where we interview anglers to look at their catch.

Jeremy Leitz is with Coastal Fisheries. Last year the agency rolled out an online reporting tool for anglers to voluntarily share their snapper landing information.

06- However, in the very near future, there will be a free app coming out along with a new site to report your landings on.

That FREE app is iSnapper, developed by the Harte Research Institute. Leitz says iSnapper gives Texas Parks and Wildlife another tool to validate the data collected from current monitoring programs.

26- Anglers will be [voluntarily] inputting very basic information: it’s the date of the trip, how many people were on your trip, the number of fish caught, the number of snapper landed. Just very basic pieces of information–it will take just a few seconds to fill out. I’d like to emphasize only one person needs to report per trip. Our hope with this is that it just gives us another piece of information to help monitor that species, to help gather information on the population levels of fish that are out there. Also, it’s a way for anglers to be more involved in the management of the species.

Download the app from isnapper.org.

The Sport Fish Restoration program supports our series.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2015 at 12:00 am and is filed under Conservation, Fishing, Research, Saltwater, Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration Program. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.