Eleven of twelve Bahamian seafood species are overfished. Now we finally have the numbers to prove it.

The Bahamas has managed its reef and pelagic fisheries for decades without species-specific stock assessments for most of the commercial and recreational catch. It is not an oversight. Full age-structured assessments need long fishery-independent surveys, age and growth sampling, and consistent species-level catch reporting that simply do not exist for most small-scale or developing-country fisheries anywhere in the world. And so managers, fishers, vendors, cooks and diners have been making decisions about conch, grouper, snapper, hogfish and lobster without a defensible picture of how much of each stock is actually left.

This paper closes that gap for twelve species at once. Using a data-limited method called CMSY++ (Froese et al., 2023), the authors reconstructed seventy-three years of Bahamian fisheries catch, from 1950 through 2022, then asked, species by species: how much biomass is left relative to what would support the largest sustainable harvest? The results give The Bahamas its first quantitative, globally comparable baseline for managing these fisheries.

The answer is not comfortable. Of the twelve species assessed:

• Two species are “grossly overfished” — Nassau grouper and yellowfin grouper, both below 50% of the biomass that would support maximum sustainable yield.
• Six species are “overfished” — queen conch, Caribbean spiny lobster, hogfish, black grouper, rock hind and wahoo.
• Three species are “slightly overfished” — lane snapper, mutton snapper and gray snapper.
• One species is healthy — dolphinfish (mahi mahi). The paper cautions this is a shared Western Central Atlantic stock and Bahamian-water-specific numbers are not conclusive on their own.

Recreational fishing is a bigger slice of the Bahamian catch than most people realise

The seventy-three-year reconstruction estimates that The Bahamas has taken roughly 1.3 million tonnes of seafood out of its waters between 1950 and 2022, at an annual average of around 17,500 tonnes. The share of that catch by fishing sector is the paper’s first surprise:

• Recreational sector — 46%. Tourism-driven charter boats, sportfishing and visiting anglers are the largest single source of catch over the time series.
• Industrial sector — 26%. Dominated by the export-oriented spiny lobster fishery.
• Artisanal sector — 23%. Small-boat, small-scale commercial fishing.
• Subsistence — 5%. Food-on-the-table fishing by Bahamian residents.

Two species dominate. Caribbean spiny lobster alone accounts for 33% of the country’s total reconstructed catch, roughly 425,000 tonnes over seventy-three years. Queen conch is another 21%. Between them, these two invertebrates represent more than half the seafood The Bahamas has taken from its waters over the study period. Both are now classified as overfished: spiny lobster at 61% of the biomass that would support maximum sustainable yield, queen conch at 59%.

The reef groupers and snappers tell the hardest story. Catches of Nassau grouper, IUCN-listed as Critically Endangered since 2015, remained above the maximum sustainable yield for nearly four decades before collapsing from their mid-1990s peak. The paper finds no sign of recovery in the 2018–2022 data. Yellowfin grouper, at just 40% of the healthy reference level, is the worst-off species in the study. These species are the backbone of The Bahamas’ domestic seafood supply. Their overfished status means fewer fish in local markets and on local plates unless management action is taken.

Where each species sits on the sustainability scorecard

Values below are the ratio of current biomass to the biomass that would support maximum sustainable yield (B/B_MSY), averaged over 2018–2022. A value of 1.0 or above is healthy. Values below 0.2 are considered collapsed.

Adapted from Palomares et al. (2026), Table 7. Values are averages over the 2018–2022 period.

How do you assess a stock when you don’t have the data a full assessment would need?

Traditional age-structured stock assessments, the kind used for North Atlantic cod or Pacific salmon, demand decades of fishery-independent surveys, age and growth sampling, and consistent catch reporting disaggregated by species. Most Bahamian fisheries do not have that. Neither do the vast majority of small-scale fisheries anywhere in the world.

CMSY++ (Froese, Winker, Coro, Demirel et al., 2023) was designed for this gap. It combines three things a data-poor fishery usually does have: a reconstructed catch history, expert priors on how productive each species is, and conservative assumptions about where the stock probably sat at the start, middle and end of the time series. The method sweeps the space of plausible population parameters to find combinations consistent with the catch record and the priors, then estimates maximum sustainable yield, current biomass relative to the healthy reference point, and current fishing pressure relative to the sustainable rate.

The authors did not rely on catch data alone. They strengthened their priors with long-term PIMS survey data, AGRRA (Atlantic and Gulf Rapid Reef Assessment) time series, regional stock assessments from the Gulf of Mexico and southeastern Florida, and IUCN Red List evaluations. The result is a twelve-species snapshot of Bahamian fisheries status that is peer-reviewed and globally comparable with assessments the Sea Around Us team has produced for more than 270 countries and territories.

The twelve assessed species, illustrated

Alongside the paper, PIMS produced plain-language species fact sheets for each of the twelve assessed species, illustrated by Bahamian scientific illustrator Andrew Knowles. Each card covers IUCN conservation status, habitat, reproduction, ecological role, and current stock assessment finding, written for vendors, restaurants, cooks, anglers and consumers.

Species illustrations © Andrew Knowles for the Perry Institute for Marine Science.

Why this science matters for what ends up on the plate

The assessment paper is the quantitative half of a larger PIMS initiative, the Bahamian Domestic Seafood Project, funded by the Builders Initiative, aimed at giving Bahamian consumers, fishers, vendors, cooks and policymakers the information they need to shift the domestic seafood trade onto a sustainable footing.

The other half is already in public view: the short documentary Seafood Nation, directed by Matt McCoy of Loggerhead Productions, which premiered at Baha Mar in December 2025 and has continued to screen at venues across New Providence. Seafood Nation puts faces, hands, recipes and boats to the numbers, showing how deeply Bahamian culture is shaped by what the sea provides, and what is at stake if the catch keeps drawing down.

Together, the assessment paper, the species fact sheets and the documentary give the public, fishers, vendors and policymakers a shared set of tools to understand the state of these fisheries and the choices available to them.

What happens after the numbers are on the table

Bahamian fisheries respond when management is real and enforcement is consistent

The paper is not only difficult news. Its Discussion section identifies two concrete reasons for optimism, both directly relevant to The Bahamas.

In the 2024–2025 spawning season, researchers observed a large, seemingly healthy Nassau grouper aggregation off the Ragged Islands: a remote site where the country’s closed-season regulations apply but which is fished less often because safe access requires several consecutive days of favorable weather in winter. That site, and others in remote parts of the archipelago, are exactly where targeted protection could yield disproportionate recovery.

In Little Cayman, a Nassau grouper population has more than tripled over roughly fifteen years in response to conservation, the clearest regional demonstration that local management interventions, closures and protection of spawning aggregations, can yield positive results. The paper notes that “The Bahamas has several remote FSAs and more reported sites than many other countries, which provide additional opportunities for recovery, especially when paired with regulatory reform and stakeholder support.”

Questions people ask about this research

Related PIMS and Sea Around Us research

• Sherman K.D. et al. (2025). Stakeholder perspectives on status and conservation of Nassau grouper in The Bahamas. Gulf and Caribbean Research 36.
• Sherman K.D., Dahlgren C.P. et al. (2020). RAD-seq analysis and in situ monitoring of Nassau grouper reveal fine-scale population structure. Frontiers in Marine Science 7: 157.
• Dahlgren C.P., Sherman K.D. et al. (2017). Nassau grouper migration patterns during full moon suggest collapsed historic spawning aggregation. Bulletin of Marine Science 93.
• Sherman K.D., Dahlgren C.P. et al. (2018). Contemporary and emerging fisheries in The Bahamas. Fisheries Management and Ecology 25(5): 319–331.
• Browse the full PIMS publication library.