The Story About Snappers

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January 14, 2022

The Seven Seas Blog

Trip Reports & News
Jan 14, 2022

By Peter Mous.

I have always liked snappers, perhaps because they are so recognizable as a bona fide,
standard-issue fish. Ask a 5-year old to draw a fish, and she will put something on paper
that follows the basic outline of a snapper, swimming around in the lower half of the water
column. One might forgive her for adding bubbles coming out of its mouth, but for the rest
it would be pretty accurate. If you would project a bohar snapper Lutjanus bohar on that
drawing, it would fit the outline better than say a tuna or a flounder, let alone a lionfish or
a mudskipper.

The bohar snapper is perhaps the most abundant mid-sized snapper on the reefs of
Indonesia. Any diver visiting a reasonable intact reef in Indonesia has come across a
couple of bohars. Their usual coloration is a brownish red, but in the spawning season
some of them, presumably the males, get pale silvery flanks and a dark back. You will find
small ones (10 cm from snout to tail) as well as big ones on the reef, which suggests that
they spend most of their lives on the reef. They keep their distance from divers without
being shy, and the bigger ones like to swim a couple of meters away from the reef. They
sometimes mix with other snappers—the smaller ones sometimes team up with
humpback snapper Lutjanus gibbus, and the larger ones once in a while chill with
midnight snappers Macolor macularis or go for a work-out with bigeye trevallies. They
have a stocky build, and they are powerful swimmers.

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Fisher in front of The Seven Seas
In the southern channel into the lagoon of Meaterialam Atoll we found a huge spawning
aggregation of these snappers—hundreds of bohars at about 15 m depth, many of them
in spawning colors, and not nearly as cautious with us divers as they normally are. I just
love being in a big school, as the fish stream by, sometimes enclosing me, with some of
the braver ones checking me out. It seems that each fish species has its own way to
check out SCUBA divers. Bohars just stream by, but you still feel being noticed; schools
of humpback snappers and sailfin snappers don’t seem to notice anything and they just
go about their business as if the diver wasn’t there. A school of barracudas can seem a
bit threatening as they swim towards a diver and start circling her, whereas bigeye
trevallies like to stay close together and it looks as if a diver punches a hole in a wall of
glittering fish as she gets up and close. At Meaterialam Atoll, the bohars were the stars of
the show, but they were not the only protagonists. There were large schools of Lutjanus
russelli, longnose emperors, and bigeye trevallies, a small group of very big, male
Napoleon wrasse, accompanied by the much smaller females, some oceanic coral trout
Plectropomus laevis, and even a young giant grouper Epinephelus lanceolatus.

Both snappers and groupers aggregate to spawn, but they do so in different ways. The
males one of the most common aggregating groupers of Indonesia, the squaretail
coraltrout Plectropomus areolatus stake out a small territory of a couple of square meters
on the reef, usually a flat, sandy bit in between corals, waiting for females to get close. So
a spawning aggregation of these groupers looks a bit like a tapestry of suburban gardens,
with each male jealously guarding his patch. The males don’t mind presence of other fish
species, but they do fight with their conspecific neighbors. Snappers, on the other hand,

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form large schools, where all fish seem to have a similar idea of where to go and what to
do. I have never seen them fight among themselves, and they don’t show bite marks like
the groupers do.

I do not normally rate fish in terms of their eating qualities, but with its pretty reddish
coloration the bohar snapper look as if they were designed for a barbeque or as a sweet-
and-sour dish with green onions and ginger. First impressions can be deceiving, however,
as these fish are almost inedible! The meat of the bigger ones is very tough, and in
Australia and the countries east of Indonesia these fish are known to be ciguatoxic.
Ciguatoxin is produced by certain algae that live on some (but not all) reefs, and this toxin
bio-accumulates. That means that this toxin is found in increasing concentrations as
energy moves up the food chain through predation. The top predators, which include the
bohar snappers, end up with a high concentration of the toxin. This does not bother the
fish itself (well, perhaps it does, but it’s difficult to find out), but having a cigatoxic fish for
dinner causes nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting. Ciguatera poisoning is rare in Indonesia,
so the bohar snappers may be safe to eat, but let’s just conclude that even a low risk of
ciguatera is still a good reason to leave these snappers in their element.

For commercial fisheries, the quintessential red snapper of Indonesia is the Malabar
snapper Lutjanus malabaricus. I have never seen them on a reef, instead they favor seas
with a flat, sandy bottom up to a depth of about 100 m. In Indonesia, the main fishing
grounds for this species are the Java Sea, the Arafura Sea, and the seas around the
Natuna islands in west Indonesia, where they are caught with droplines, longlines, and
traps. Sometimes caught together with Malabar snapper is the goldband snapper
Pristopomoides multidens, so called because of the faint golden bands on its head and
back. There are various snappers of the genus Pristipomoides, and they all have a similar
shape: A blunt nose, a body shaped like a torpedo, and a single dorsal fin that runs along
much of the back of the fish, and a v-shaped tail fin. These fish are built for speed!
Goldbands tend to prefer deeper habitats than the Malabars do.

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Malabar snappers, here pictured in Brondong, North Java, are the most important
commercial snapper species in Indonesia.

Goldband snapper Pristipomoides multidens, at a fish processing plant in Bali.

Going down the continental shelf to depths beyond 200m, it gets too difficult to deploy
longlines or traps, so fishers use droplines to fish at these greater depths. Droplines are
lines with a weight at the end and about seven hooks attached to the main line with side
lines or snoods. Each line is operated by a fisher, by hand or by a hand-cranked reel. We
are now entering the realm of the “true” deepwater snappers! My favorite deepwater
snapper is the flame snapper, Etelis coruscans. Bright red, with a forked tail that has a
very long upper lobe—one can only guess at the evolutionary advantage of that tail fin,
but it’s very pretty.

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Fisher in North Sulawesi, holding a flame snapper
The “true” deepwater snappers live on the slopes of the continental shelf, and also on the
slopes of the many volcanic islands along the inner Banda Arch. During our Epic trip
onboard Seven Seas we ran into snapper fishers at Manuk Island—these fishers hailed
from the Banda Islands, traveling 100 nautical miles in a small open boat to fish the deep

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slopes of this volcanic island. We were surprised that these fishers traveled that far, since
Banda itself should also have the same fish. The fishers, however, said that fishing at
Manuk was better, and since they needed a good amount for a wedding party back home
they invested the fuel and time for a round trip to Manuk.

Seven Seas guest Dr Jos S. Pet meets snapper fishers from Banda at Manuk Island,
Maluku. Jos is holding a rusty jobfish Aphareus rutilans in his right hand, and a slender
pinjalo Pinjalo lewisi, in his left hand. Both are deepwater snappers
The trip of the Banda fishers illustrates a common phenomenon in fisheries: Once local
fishing grounds get depleted, fishers have to travel further to fill up the hold. The Banda
islands themselves still offer fishing opportunities, it just would have taken these fishers
too long to get the volume that they needed for the wedding party. Especially the “true”
deepwater snappers get over-exploited easily. They tend to hang out in schools around
an underwater mountain, cliff, or a wreck, and once the fishers locate such a place it’s
easy to catch them. In eastern Indonesia, some of the villages take ownership of the best
sea mountains, jealously guarding access to these excellent fishing grounds.

So what does a “sustainable” snapper fishery actually mean? The fishers we met in
Manuk were clearly disappointed with the fishing sites around the Banda Islands, even
though Banda Islands would still be considered “almost pristine” by scientists and diving
naturalists. Despite recent coral bleaching events, the corals around Banda are still in
excellent condition and many of the reef fish species are still at their pristine biomass. On
the other hand, it’s clear that the larger sharks have been decimated. Intuitively, one
might say that the snappers of the Banda Sea must be somewhere between “pristine”

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and “decimated”. In fact, the fishery program I work for estimated that the Malabar
snappers are at 13%, the goldband snappers at 16%, and flame snappers are (sadly) at
7% of their pristine biomass. Is that “sustainable”?

As a fisheries biologist I must adhere to the convention that a stock exploited down to half
its pristine biomass can be considered a healthy, sustainably fished stock. If Indonesia’s
fisheries managers and fishing communities succeed in keeping the stock at that level,
one can even apply for certification to the sustainability standards of Marine Stewardship
Council. As a marine naturalist, however, I still feel that taking half is, well, pretty greedy.
After all, humankind is not the only hazard that these fish need to contend with. There is
also predation by anything that is somewhat bigger than these snappers: Sharks, tuna,
marlins, sharks, dolphins and toothed whales, and so on. I do not put all the blame on
fishers or even fishing companies. The main problem is the indifference of the market
(that’s all of us) about the origin and sustainability of our food. This is changing, but a lot
of work still needs to be done to save the snappers.

I worry about those deepwater snappers. It was difficult enough to develop an

appreciation for underwater life among the general public, but we got there thanks to
SCUBA diving, and documentaries about the world’s tropical reefs. These days, just
about anybody has the opportunity to learn about coral reefs, if only through the
underwater footage shot by professional and amateur divers available on the internet.
The true deepwater snappers, however, live at depths greater than 150 meters, and so
far the only way to appreciate them has been by yanking them out of their habitat to the
surface, for fun or for food. Flapping on the deck of the fishing vessel, out of its element,
the flame snapper, Etelis coruscans, displays its magnificent red color. What most of us
perceive as pretty was never intended to be enjoyed as such, since the color red is the
first to disappear from the spectrum as light penetrates the water column. I guess that
evolving as a red fish was just the easiest way to achieve a deep black in its natural
habitat.

There is nothing for it—we must learn to appreciate these magnificent snappers without
seeing them. Consider it a long-distance relationship with nature, and it’s a relationship
that deserves attention. If we loose the deepwater snappers, because of need, greed, or
carelessness, we’ll find ourselves impoverished in more ways than we can anticipate.

Peter Mous
December 2021

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