Everyone who has fished for tarpon knows they are iconic. Anglers and guides organize their lives around tarpon season, and even chase the Silver King around the region as the season progresses. Tarpon are so mythic that a tarpon graces the Sistine Chapel as the whale that ate Jonah. And the species is a major part of the world-renowned Florida Keys flats fishery, which has an annual economic impact exceeding $465 million.
Despite all of that, in the world of fisheries management and conservation, tarpon are considered “data poor.” This means that we have never had and will likely never have a stock assessment of tarpon—fisheries agencies don’t have the resources and standard stock assessments typically require dead fish for analysis. How many tarpon are there today? How many were there 50 years ago? How can we track the trends in the fishery so we can better gauge fishery health and guide better management and conservation?
Bonefish & Tarpon Trust (BTT) is partnering with colleagues at Project Seagrass and Florida International University to develop methods to fill this data gap. The first step in this process is the new survey, called Best Catch Assessment (BECAA). This approach relies on the memories of anglers and guides to estimate trends in the status of the fishery historically through today. The surveys we are conducting now (the bonefish survey was completed in 2025; here we present the results of the tarpon survey; the permit survey will occur in late summer) establish the historical trends and current status. In the future, we will repeat the surveys to track the fisheries over time.
Continue reading at bonefishtarpontrust.org.
