Critically Endangered
Nassau grouper
Epinephelus striatus
The Nassau grouper is one of the large number of perciform fishes in the family Serranidae commonly referred to as groupers.
Appearance
Its color varies depending on an individual fish's circumstances and environment. In shallow water down to 60 ft (18 m), the grouper is a tawny color, but specimens living in deeper waters are pinkish or red, or sometimes orange-red in color. Superimposed on this base color are a number of lighter stripes, darker spots, bars, and patterns, among them black spots below and behind the eyes, and a forked stripe on the top of the head.
The Nassau grouper is a medium to large fish, growing to over 1 m (3.3 ft) in length and up to 25 kg (55 lb) in weight.
Range and habitat
The Nassau grouper lives near reefs. It is one of the largest fish to be found around coral reefs. It can be found from the shoreline to depths near 330 ft (100 m). It lives in the western Atlantic Ocean and around the Caribbean Sea, from Bermuda, Florida, and the Bahamas in the north to the eastern coast of Venezuela, but it is only found in a few places in the Gulf of Mexico, most notably along the coast of Belize.
The governments of the United States, the Cayman Islands, and the Bahamas have banned or instituted closed fishing seasons for the Nassau grouper in recent years. In the Cayman Islands, fishing in the spawning holes of the grouper had been banned until the end of 2016.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Habits
Http://www.oar.noaa.gov/spotlite/archive/spot_spawn.html http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/Gallery/Descript/NassauGrouper/NassauGrouper.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110103214238/http://www.reef.org/data/groupermoon.html http://www.breef.org/Portals/0/Nassau%20Grouper%20notes.pdf The Nassau grouper is one of the large number of perciform fishes in the family Serranidae commonly referred to as groupers.
In crisis
It is the most important of the groupers for commercial fishery in the West Indies, but has been endangered by overfishing. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the Nassau grouper as critically endangered, due to commercial and recreational fishing and reef destruction. The Nassau grouper is a US National Marine Fisheries Service-listed threatened species by authority of the Endangered Species Act of 1973.
The species is therefore highly vulnerable to overexploitation, and is recognized as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List. It is in a very high rate of decline and is at serious risk of becoming extinct.
Nassau grouper is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Nassau grouper, Wikidata item Q943193. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
