The redfish blues

Louisiana’s coastline is a river delta, formed by the Mississippi over millennia as its current slowed and relinquished its mud into a calm and sheltered gulf. In the back-and-forth contest between the river’s flow and the incoming waves, then, the power of the Mississippi River won out. There’s nowhere else quite like Louisiana, with its intricate landscape of bays, bayous, and inlets that wind, maze-like, through a seemingly endless expanse of marsh.

Sitting on a boat, the results can seem empty and monotonous—nothing but cordgrass as far as the horizon. That’s because the real action lies beneath the surface. Nutrients carried by the river and the ocean meet here, in this estuary, feeding plant life, which in turn feeds an abundant food chain of fish. This abundance has long shaped local culture. Fifteen hundred years ago, when Indigenous corn farmers began to clear and plant the Mississippi’s banks upstream, Louisiana was marked as a place apart: Agriculture did not really take hold here, not when there were so many fish to catch. The first European colonists, too, marveled at the bounty. “The rivers are full of monstrous fish,” a nun stationed in New Orleans in 1727 wrote to her French father. She noted an “infinity” of species not then known in Europe.

Archaeological records from the era show that drum species were among the most popular, and today one drum species—red drum, better known as redfish—has become a symbol of the region. Delta fishermen eventually learned to smell redfish from a hundred yards off, and to distinguish the clouds of mud kicked up by their tails from those made by mullet or sheepshead. By the 19th century, anglers were chasing redfish for more than just sustenance. One of the first guidebooks for American anglers, published in 1865, declared that redfish in the Gulf of Mexico “afford fine sport”: They hit bait hard and could run off 40 feet of line in a quick and angry dash. When a New York aristocrat launched Forest and Stream a few years later, the magazine described the Gulf as a “sportsman’s paradise,” a phrase that be- came a Louisiana motto, now appearing on the state’s license plates. By the late 1980s, amid concerns that the species was being overfished, it was declared a game fish. That meant it was set aside for anglers alone—no commercial harvest allowed.

Even a fairly young redfish is a taut torpedo of muscle—a beast of an animal, which after a few years can reach as much as nine pounds, almost too big for the shallow waters that have been its nursery. That size is key to their appeal: A charging redfish will send a wave rolling atop the surface. While wade-fishing off a barrier island, you can feel the water beating from their presence. Some fishermen have compared the sound of a school to a passing freight train. Although redfish range as far north as Massachusetts, they love marshlands—which makes the great labyrinth of Louisiana’s delta a particular redfish hot spot. Today, the fish is among the foremost targets of the state’s billion-dollar sport-fishing industry.

But for complex reasons, officials believe local redfish populations are now in danger. At the same time, Louisiana’s marshes are eroding, and its coastline is fraying. The fates of its iconic fish and its wetlands appear inextricably linked. Their looming decline represents a warning—and raises hard questions about how a seafood culture can adapt to a changing world.

As more of an eater than an angler, until recently I knew about redfish for one reason: because a blackened redfish fillet is not just a symbol of Louisiana cuisine, but the dish that made Cajun cooking a worldwide sensation. It’s a relatively modern invention, created in 1979, when a chef named Paul Prudhomme, proprietor of K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen in New Orleans’ French Quarter, felt nostalgic for the taste of his father’s campfire cooking. Hoping to conjure the same smoky flavor in his tiny kitchen, where there was no grill, Prudhomme dragged a fillet of redfish through butter, seasoned it with spices and threw it into a smoking-hot skillet.

Prudhomme died in 2015, but Frank Brigtsen, then the night chef at K-Paul’s, still recalls the fateful evening when he saw Prudhomme cook that first fillet—so black that Brigtsen was skeptical anyone would want it. Then Brigtsen took a bite. “And I said, ‘This is the best damn fish I ever had in my life,’” he told me. “That was the start of it all.”

Redfish was not then known as a marquee restaurant fish. It was popular with home cooks, sure—a “king” of the New Orleans French market, or so one early 20th-century cookbook declared—but it was considered too cheap for fine dining. (There were workarounds: Brigtsen once cooked at a restaurant that unscrupulously labeled one redfish dish as “snapper Pontchartrain” as a way to boost the price.)

Blackening redfish changed the fate of the species—and the city. K-Paul’s became one of the hottest local tickets, and when The New York Times caught wind of the dish, the paper’s coverage helped make Prudhomme one of America’s first celebrity chefs. Cajun food had been considered rustic, provincial; now, Cajun mania swept the world. Before the 1980s ended, there were Cajun restaurants in New York City and London and Amsterdam. The trend would fade soon enough, but it certified Louisiana as one of America’s culinary destinations.

Once he’d invented the dish, Prudhomme maintained exacting culinary standards, serving only ten-ounce redfish fillets, which were drawn from four-pound redfish. That meant a young fish, 6 years or less in age—the sort caught by a fisherman stringing a net through the marshes. Prudhomme’s motivation was taste, but this choice had important ecological implications, because full-grown redfish travel to offshore waters more suitable to their size. By targeting young redfish, fishermen were leaving the main breeding populations alone. These bigger, offshore fish—known as “bull reds”—can reach 60 pounds or more. They gather in massive schools that are visible from above, by plane. While it was easy to catch a lot of these fish at once, the flesh isn’t that tasty; as a fisherman once told me, eating a bull red is like eating a truck. Since the meat is coarse and overly fishy, there was no good market for bull reds.

But Prudhomme’s smash hit changed the calculus: Chefs in New York City seemed not to notice the bad taste of the biggest redfish, or maybe they figured their customers would be distracted by the spices. The sudden demand in the early 1980s sparked a new approach to Gulf fishing. Airplane spotters, flying above the coast, watched for the telltale bronzed backs of a school of bull reds; then they’d call down to boats that could ensnare the entire school. Some old-fashioned fishermen, used to working in the marshes, were aghast at the scale of the take. “We didn’t want ’em,” one said later about the new competition. “We knew we were headed for trouble.” Soon, Prudhomme, too, saw the trouble. In 1985, on a visit to one of K-Paul’s seafood suppliers, he and Brigtsen overheard a manager on the phone, arranging to buy an entire school of redfish—hundreds of 30-pound bulls, amounting to 10,000 pounds of fish. “When he said that, Paul’s face went white—ashen white,” Brigtsen recalled. “And I just about cried.” The sheer number of fish was overwhelming. “Raping the resource,” Brigtsen went on, “to sell this fish that we wouldn’t eat.” Before the blackened redfish craze began, a big year in the Gulf might yield two million pounds of redfish. Halfway through 1986, fishermen had pulled in six million pounds from federal waters alone. Federal officials, who predicted the total harvest that year could hit 20 million, ended the season early. When Prudhomme recognized what he’d unleashed, he switched over to blackening tuna. “It would be tragic for me, personally, to know that redfish would be ex- tinct,” he told a journalist that same year.

The rise of blackened redfish coincided with a dawning awareness of another coastal problem: Louisiana was disappearing. For more than a decade, scientists had been asserting that its wetlands were being swallowed by the ocean. But it was hard to convince the public to care. A boom in fishing in the 1980s—spurred in part by a sudden wave of oil layoffs but helped along by the demand created by Prudhomme’s famed dish—convinced many locals that the marsh was far smaller than what their ancestors had known, helping waken the state to the crisis.

The causes were varied. This land sinks naturally already, compacting under its own weight; the marshes had persisted because they were not just built by the river’s mud, but continuously rebuilt, new floods delivering new mud, again and again. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, as engineers built levees along the Mississippi River to contain the floods, they wound up containing the mud, too. Now, instead of spreading across the landscape, it was carried to the river’s mouth and, once it reached the ocean, got dumped off the edge of the continental shelf. When, beginning in the early 20th century, oil companies dredged canals to lay down pipelines, they exacerbated the trouble. Estuaries contain a delicate mixture of fresh river water and ocean salts, and these new channels carried salt inland. This poisoned some grasses, which, as they died, released their roots’ grip on the soils. The cumulative effect was catastrophic. By the 1980s, Louisiana was losing nearly 40 square miles of land each year.

There were ways to address the redfish problem, at least. A 1986 decision to limit the redfish harvest turned permanent two years later, when the federal government banned all harvest in federal waters. Louisiana followed suit, outlawing redfish harvest in state waters, which includes the marsh. There, at least, the recreational fishery eventually reopened, but the commercial fishery has been closed ever since. Nearly four decades later, this fact leaves some commercial fishermen bitter: For most of the 1980s, Gulf anglers took in far more redfish than their commercial peers. The common complaint is that the sportsmen, wealthy and powerful, managed to seize the fish for themselves.

In 1988, the same year the fishery closed, a grassroots coalition proposed a moonshot solution for the other crisis, known as land loss: The state needed a set of “diversions,” they said, carefully engineered openings that would mimic the natural process of land-rebuilding that had been halted by the levees. The idea was to direct some river water—and, crucially, its mud—through gates and channels, into the areas where the marshes had disappeared. The core of the idea was simple—just unleash the river—but it was also radical, because for years the priority had been to contain this water. It was unclear, too, how to pay for such new engineering.

Strangely, for fishermen, the loss of land did not seem to cause huge problems. Indeed, in 1989, a group of scientists conceded in a paper that, overall, the amount of seafood coming ashore in Louisiana was increasing as the marsh disappeared. The scientists offered a working hypothesis: The marsh was being lost in fragments, creating longer, jagged edges. And many species, like redfish, thrive along such edges, which make it easier to flit back and forth between habitats. It’s a strange paradox: Less marsh can actually mean more habitat. But only at first. The paper noted that eventually so much marsh would disappear that the length of the shoreline would have to decrease, too. And that’s when fish stocks would crash. So the scientists worried that the recent increase in seafood catches had “created a sense of false security that has delayed action to curb wetland loss.” Scientists weren’t sure, though, when the crash would come. Nor was it clear what it would look like.

Indeed, Richard Condrey, who as an ecologist at Louisiana State University in the 1980s led the panel that set national redfish policy, notes that the whole idea that land loss must trigger a collapse in fish stocks remains speculative—not untrue, necessarily, just difficult to prove. Fish populations are always fluctuating, driven by, among other factors, what tools fishermen use, how much seafood restaurants are buying and how the weather has been. Trying to determine the impact of habitat loss alone is difficult. So when and how land loss will impact species is a question that can only be answered in retrospect—once the catastrophe arrives.

It’s striking how little we know about oceans in general—though, then again, these are difficult places for land-dwelling scientists to conduct research. As Prudhomme’s famous dish took off in the 1980s, federal scientists lacked even the basic biological information they needed to determine how many fish could be sustainably harvested. And when the commercial harvest was closed, at least one federal official speculated that any further research might get curtailed, since those anglers, many of them rich and well connected, wouldn’t want scientists mucking around in what had become their territory.

Subsequent studies were indeed sparse. In the early 2000s, Louisiana biologists found that the “escapement rate” was well above the goals set by Condrey and the council as a key metric: Enough young fish were leaving the marsh each year, joining the offshore schools, to ensure a sustainable population. Then, for nearly two decades after, no one bothered to check again. In the meantime, the redfish became an essential component of Louisiana’s booming recreational fishing economy.

That made it noteworthy when Todd Masson, a popular Louisiana outdoors writer, noted in a YouTube video in 2022 that he’d gone through a two-month period in which he caught no redfish. “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a decline in a fisheries population like what we’re witnessing now,” he said.

The state’s biologists decided they ought to run the numbers. And, indeed, in the decades since their previous calculations, the escapement rate had plummeted; the number of redfish harvested, meanwhile, had dropped to the lowest numbers recorded since the 1980s. The scientists I spoke to emphasized how it’s impossible to pin down just one cause for the decline—climate change may play a role, as might the ever-growing size of the recreational fishing industry—but Patrick Banks, the assistant secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, told me that habitat loss was “a huge, huge part of the equation.” The juvenile fish are losing their nursery. We may be entering the era of decline in the marsh, in other words. Banks noted that another popular species, speckled trout, was also suffering.

Louisiana now has an office working to restore the marsh: the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, formed in 2007 in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which specializes in “trying to figure out how to stop the loss and rebuild our coast,” as Banks put it. “And I certainly pray they’re successful, because that’s the habitat we need.” In 2023, after years of negotiation and planning, the agency began construction on a major river diversion. But last year, after I interviewed Banks, construction was stalled by a lawsuit filed by, among other groups, local oystermen, who worry it will kill off their reefs. Governor Jeff Landry, who took office amid the dispute, has complained about the lack of local input and expressed worries that the project could “break our culture” by hurting commercial fishing. It’s unclear whether the diversion will ever be completed. And even if it is, climate modeling suggests that it offers the delta at best a reprieve. Climate-driven sea-level rise will keep swallowing the marshland at a rate too fast to counteract. This means that no matter what we do, in terms of restoration and fishing policy, redfish will keep losing their nursery.

Nonetheless, the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries decided that, given the declines, it had to intervene. Overfishing might not be the root cause of the problem, Banks told me, but given redfish’s decline, “we cannot allow the fishing levels that are currently occurring to continue”—a controversial idea among anglers, many of whom did not want to stop chasing this favored fish.

In July 2024, after almost a year of debate, a new set of rules was instituted. Among other measures, the “bag limit,” or the number of redfish an angler can keep each day, was reduced from five to four. The state’s models suggest that, with this new policy in place, it will take 25 years for populations to recover— during which period the marshes will continue to decline. As always, it’s hard to predict precisely how populations will fare, locally and nationally, but the future hardly looks bright.

For now, the species remains a cultural force in Louisiana, for sportsmen and chefs alike: Despite the commercial fishing ban, New Orleans restaurants still offer blackened redfish, though few menus admit that the fillet on your plate is almost never wild-caught. (Mississippi, which permits a small quota, is the only Gulf state where it’s still legal to harvest redfish.) Frank Brigtsen, for example—who now owns his own award-winning restaurant, Brigtsen’s, tucked on a quiet block just off the Mississippi River in Uptown New Orleans—buys his fillets from farms in Texas.

Brigtsen has long been an advocate for commercial fishermen, and he is not delighted to be serving this out-of-state, non-wild fish. But it’s the only way he can keep serving the iconic dish he cooked so many times in his mentor’s kitchen and that so many tourists seek. If you’re a fan of regional seafood, Brigtsen’s Texan redfish, hailing from the Gulf, is an acceptable substitute. Not every restaurant is so conscientious. In its latest major report on redfish, released in early 2023, the federal government noted that most of the farm-raised redfish consumed in America is imported from China and Vietnam. That’s in part because Texas farms have suffered from recent snaps of cold weather. It also matches the broader trend: Almost 80 percent of the seafood consumed in the U.S. is now imported. As southern Louisiana disappears, and as its supply of seafood is curtailed, redfish could serve as a kind of warning for how the state might end up salvaging its culinary culture: just ship in farm-raised seafood from somewhere else. Consider this the Disneyland future, in which restaurants gesture toward an old Louisiana identity, a lost relationship with a marshland that no longer exists.

Porgy’s Seafood Market, which opened in New Orleans in 2023, offers what I see as a more appealing approach: It sells a variety of fish, all wild-caught, often “bycatch”—species taken incidentally while fishermen

seek more popular fish. “Just about every species that’s commercially fished is inherently delicious when handled properly,” says Marcus Jacobs, the shop’s chef and co-owner. Black drum, for example, can substitute for redfish; sheepshead and amberjack are tasty but overlooked choices for diners, too. I’ve tried both and found that, as a consumer, nothing is lost by moving beyond the most famous fish.

Still, wanting to taste the famous species—wanting to feel its famous might on a fishing line—I decide to catch my own wild redfish. Under gray November skies, I motor onto Lake St. Catherine, an expanse of slightly salty water an hour east of New Orleans. Chris Macaluso, the marine fisheries director for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a nonprofit that works to secure access to hunting and fishing, has agreed to help get me a fish. Macaluso, too, suggests that rather than fighting over redfish, sportsmen ought to expand their notions of which fish are desirable. “You’re a lot happier as a fisherman, I think, if you’re not basing the happiness of your experience on whether or not you catch a certain species,” he says. He’s come to enjoy chasing sheepshead, for example, which until recently many anglers considered a trash fish. Sure, it’s smaller than a drum, and sometimes harder to fillet, but it’s a hard fighter—“like a caged, rabid raccoon,” Macaluso says—and good eating, too. One thing is clear: “We’re all going to have to change,” Macaluso says, somewhat wearily. Hours have passed on the boat, and again and again our casts have been fruitless. “We don’t have any choice. Either that or quit, you know, and I don’t plan on quitting anytime soon.”

Macaluso revs up the motor of his bay boat, so we can try our luck farther west, in Lake Pontchartrain. And after a false alarm—we reel in a speckled trout that Macaluso releases back into the water—finally our moment comes: a white-bellied beast, all copper and bronze in the sun, nearly two feet long. “Look at this beautiful fish,” Macaluso says as he drags our catch from the water. Seven or eight pounds, he estimates. I wonder how this fish might taste. I’ve still never had a fillet of fresh-caught redfish. But Macaluso, the consummate sportsman, poses for a picture and then places the fish gently back in the water. It lies still for a moment, recovering, then kicks away.