Can you keep a sharks (most species — see notes for exceptions) in Louisiana?

54 inches fork length, and the bag is per vessel per trip, not per angler — one shark total no matter how many anglers are aboard. Atlantic sharpnose and bonnethead sharks are the exception: no minimum size, 1 per person per day instead. Silky and sandbar sharks may never be retained, and a long list of other species — including white, dusky, sand tiger, basking, whale, both sawfish and several more — are fully prohibited. Finning (keeping only the fins) is banned everywhere, in and out of Louisiana waters.

LDWF source page

What we left out on purpose

• A summarised source still gave the old speckled trout rule of 12 inches and 25 fish. LDWF changed it, and the 2026 guide reads 13 to 20 inches with fifteen a day and no more than two over 20. The figures here come from that guide, downloaded and read directly, not from any summary.
• Louisiana names roughly a dozen individual waters with their own black bass and crappie rules — the Lower Atchafalaya Basin, Toledo Bend, Caddo Lake, False River, Poverty Point, Eagle Lake, Bussey Brake and others, some effective 1 August 2026 (found and confirmed still current on the 2026-08-08 check). None of those waters is reported on by this site, so only the statewide rule is carried. Anglers on a named water need the guide.
• The hundred-fish catfish limit is an aggregate across blue, channel and flathead together. The registry records limits per species, so each catfish page shows the shared pool rather than its own allowance, and each note says so.
• Paddlefish is left out. Its limit is measured in lower jaw fork length, which this schema does not carry, and harvest is prohibited below the saltwater line and in the boundary waters with Texas anyway.
• Sheepshead is not in LDWF's saltwater table. The guide states that species not listed have no size limit, so publishing a number for it would be inventing one — it is left out rather than shown as unlimited.
• Lake Pontchartrain is brackish and tidal. Which of the two rule sets applies to a given spot depends on where LDWF draws the saltwater line, and that boundary was not read. Both sets are published here separately rather than merged.
• Blue marlin, white marlin, roundscale spearfish and sailfish are measured in lower jaw fork length and published here as total length instead, the closest available field. All four carry no bag or possession limit in Louisiana's own table — that is not a gap in this data, it is the actual rule.
• Louisiana runs two overlapping reef-fish aggregates rather than one: a 4-fish grouper aggregate (black, gag, red, yellowfin grouper and scamp, with red and gag each capped at 2) and, separately, both a 10-fish snapper aggregate (mutton, gray, cubera, yellowtail, queen, blackfin, silk and wenchman — everything except red, vermilion and lane) and a 20-fish reef fish aggregate (vermilion and lane snapper, almaco jack, gray triggerfish and tilefish). A fish counts toward only one of these three pools, matching the grouping in LDWF's own footnotes.
• Red snapper's 4-fish bag is marked by LDWF itself as 'subject to change mid-season' — the same volatility Florida and other Gulf states handle through separate proclamations.