Gray Snapper

Gray Snappers (Lutjanus griseus) are some of the smaller and slimmer members of the snapper family Lutjanidae. Most grey snappers grow as long as 40 cm (16 in) although there are records of large individuals up to 89 cm (35 in).

Adults occupy a wide variety of coastal and offshore habitats ranging from mangroves, hardgrounds, coral reefs and human constructs such as ship wrecks, canals and harbors. Inshore habitats like seagrass beds, mangrove and also are found patrolling sandy and muddy bottoms. Both young and old have a wide tolerance for low salinities, being found in estuaries, rivers and even freshwater lakes in Florida. Adults have a depth range of 5 to 180 meters (≈16 – 591 ft), but are most frequently occur in less than 50 m (160 ft) of water.

During the daylight hours, gray snappers for schools that tuck up close to vertical structures like mangrove roots, coral heads, pilings, canal walls or wrecks. These schools disperse at night as the individual fish move out to forage for prey that include small fishes, crustaceans, gastropods, and cephalopods.

They are a western Atlantic species that occurs from Bermuda, to Massachusetts south to Florida, the Bahamas, the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean Sea, and southward to Brazil. Due to this wide geographic range and its importance as a recreational and commercial species, the gray snapper has a very large number of common names including the following:

• English - mangrove snapper, gray silk, mangrove pargue, mango snapper, pargue , black pargue, black snapper, lawyer, silk, and snapper
• Dutch - grijze zeebars
• Papiamento - caranjitu
• French - carde gris, parguette, pagre, and vivaneau sarde grise pagre
• Creole - sarde grise
• Spanish - caballerote, pargo, pargo de mangel, pargo denton, pargo manglero, and pargo prieto.
• Portuguese - caranha, castanhola, and luciano

A school of gray snapper in the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary. The santuary is located in the Gulf of Mexico about 161 km (≈ 100 miles) off the Texas coast. Photographer: G. P. Schmahl, Flower Garden Banks NMS NOAA Photo Library, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons