The fish at the bottom half of the slot taste best - but even these snook are too important to be a regular part of somebody’s diet. And those fish over 30 inches are not the best to eat either. Pretty generous, but nobody needs to kill two snook a day. Snook are hard enough to catch even when they aren’t scarce.Īs I write this, the slot limit for snook in Florida is between 26 inches and 34 inches, with two fish allowed per angler.

Catch and release of the best fish is the only way to ensure a healthy population of snook, and a big snook’s real value is on the end of a fishing rod - not in a frying pan. The process takes six or seven years and survivors are so rare, it hardly makes sense for fishermen to take even one out of the gene pool. Snook are hermaphrodites, which means that when they grow big and mature, male fish turn into females. The snook that make it this far are already special. In four years a snook can reach two feet in length- though precious few of the millions of fertilized eggs ever survive that long. A one-year-old snook is around a foot long. Three months after hatching, a snook grows to be about two inches long. Those that find their way into shallow water with cover provided by sea grasses and mangrove roots live on small crustaceans called copepods and grow at a rate of about a half inch per month. Snook fry rely on transparency to avoid predators, and luck to keep them from drifting offshore. Once hatched, newborn snook are too tiny to swim against any current, so larval snook just drift with the tide. Large female snook drop the eggs, and smaller males rush in to fertilize them. It makes it real easy to let ‘em go.Ī snook begins life on the summer spawning grounds - usually in a pass. I think about that every time I catch a big snook. 30-inch snook are trophies for most who would read this, and estimates are that two fish hatched out of every ten million snook eggs make it that far. To appreciate catching a trophy snook, it helps to know just how hard it is and how long it takes a fish to achieve that status. A Life History of Snook A Life History of Snook

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