Red drum in North Carolina:  Recent amendments to the original federal fishery management plan for red drum in the Atlantic specify the maximum sustainable yield at a Spawning Potential Ratio (SPR) of 30%, with optimum yield at a SPR of 40%.  Current assessments indicate that the Atlantic coast red drum stock is overfished with estimates of SPR between 15% and 20%.  In addition, the state of North Carolina has determined that red drum stocks within state waters are currently overfished.  State management agencies as well as federal management councils have identified several research needs to enhance the recovery of red drum stocks, most notably the collection of fishery-independent data related to recruitment of sub-adult fish and the determination of habitat preferences and habitat-specific life history metrics, such as growth and mortality, to aid in the identification of essential nursery habitat.  Of critical importance is the evaluation of relative abundance indices used to tune red drum population models and forecast recruitment failures.  In North Carolina, current sampling programs to index red drum year class strength need to be evaluated relative to first year mortality patterns and gear selectivities.  In addition, since available habitat varies considerably among estuarine systems within the state, research is also needed to quantify patterns of habitat use by red drum in multiple systems.  The goals of our research are to evaluate juvenile and sub-adult red drum populations in North Carolina estuaries through field estimates of relative abundance, habitat preference, growth, and mortality.  We are concentrating our efforts in North Carolina’s southeastern region, in systems that have historically been undersampled, in order to assess the potential contribution of these systems to juvenile red drum production relative to other regions in the state.  We are working closely with biologists from the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries to ensure that data collected will address critical research needs for the effective management of red drum populations in North Carolina.

We have been sampling fairly consistently since the fall of 2003 and have begun to establish some regular patterns in red drum early life history in North Carolina estuaries.  We have quantified hatch timing, early juvenile distributions, growth rates, and mortality rates for two large estuarine systems in the southeast region of the state.  Some of our work on growth rate variability was published in 2007 in the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology and the results of field sampling to quantify hatch timing and mortality rates was published in Transactions of the American Fisheries Society in 2008.  PDF's for these articles are available for educational purposes on the main web page.