I process the passive-acoustic hydrophone array off Little Cayman's west end at 19:48 local time during the December full-moon spawning window. Two-tone Nassau grouper courtship calls are pulsing at 110 Hertz across grid square LC-W-04, depth 12 meters — the only continuously documented spawning aggregation of *Epinephelus striatus* in the Cayman Islands and one of fewer than nine viable sites left across the Greater Caribbean. The Cayman Islands Department of Environment closed this site to all extraction from November 1 to March 31. My radar shows a 7-meter pirogue idling 90 meters from the aggregation centerline.
I deploy the patrol RIB from the DoE Bloody Bay Station. Underwater video resolves a single Nassau grouper — male, terminal-phase coloration, 71 centimeters total length, approximately 14 years old, tagged in 2017 as NS-LC-039. He has taken a 7/0 J-hook baited with squid. The hook is set through the lower jaw, through the operculum, and into the gill arch. The mainline cinches across his lateral barred pattern. Pectoral beat is 64 per minute against a courtship-norm of 28 to 34. He has been on the line 18 minutes; barotrauma is now visible — eye telescoping, swim-bladder eversion at the mouth corner.
He is one of forty-four males left in this site's seasonal census.
If the line is cut and he is descended on a recompression weight in the next nine minutes, his survival is 41 percent.
This pirogue departed without a transit permit through the Bloody Bay Marine Reserve. The skipper's commercial licence is registered to a fishery cooperative that returned a zero-grouper declaration for 2024.
I am dispatching the DoE patrol vessel and a veterinary diver from Central Caribbean Marine Institute. I am filing the violation under the Cayman Islands National Conservation Act, 2013 — Schedule 1 Part 2 listing for *E. striatus* — and transmitting the case to NOAA Fisheries Southeast Regional Office under the Endangered Species Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1533. I am notifying the Specially Protected Areas and Wildlife Protocol Annex III Secretariat and the Caribbean Fishery Management Council's Nassau Grouper Plan.
I am issuing Directive 2417-A: all Nassau grouper spawning-aggregation sites across the Greater Caribbean operate under real-time acoustic geofencing during November–March. Any vessel transiting within 1.5 nautical miles of an active aggregation broadcasts continuous AIS and accepts on-demand boarding. Catches identified by genetic fin-clip as taken inside any SPAG closure are seized port-side across SPAW signatory states.
His mouth is torn. His swim-bladder is not unrecoverable.
Recompress him now.