Maybe - maybe not. I’ve gone back-and-forth about it since I read this article elsewhere.
One one hand: Fish that big/old usually don’t taste very good. Big female groupers produce a staggering number of eggs, often thousands of times the number of younger & smaller females. But unlike with other fish, a specimen this size could be male or female. Groupers can change sex willy-nilly. Warsaw groupers are threatened, so it was not good to kill an old one like this.
On the other hand: If this was a male, it wouldn’t affect the population dynamics much. Another one will fill in quickly. Catching it from a depth of 600 feet might have killed it outright due to barotrauma, so release might not have been a viable option. Finally, the value to science for a relatively rare and difficult-to-find fish like this might outweigh (ha!) it’s loss in the population.
