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Each winter and spring, hundreds of silvery brown gag groupers gather in the same places in warm Gulf waters to spawn. But this popular Florida fish, savored by seafood lovers for its taste and sought by sport fishermen for its fighting spirit, is in trouble from overfishing. Today these aggregations of gag are rarer, and individual fish smaller, than in years past. ...Right now, fishermen are allowed to troll for large migratory fish like tuna that live near the surface, the only kind of fishing permitted. "Unfortunately," says our marine biologist Pam Baker, "the scientific evidence clearly shows that trolling in the reserves can harm gag. Even though the thinking is that highly migratory fish usually travel closer to the surface while gag prefer deeper water, the problem is that trolling gear can easily be rigged to catch gag, and it is extremely hard to detect illegal trolling and enforce the regulations." VIEW ARTICLE AT Environmental Defense

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