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.
Human memories can provide important information. Our brains are inherently quantitative. We and other animals tend to think in numbers. The new BECAA method takes advantage of this tendency to ask about best catches because this is the way we remember our fishing experiences. We tend to remember the best day we had fishing. Of course, individual perspectives differ, but if we combine the collective experiences and memories of a lot of anglers and guides, we can develop a pretty good sense of the fishery.
For the tarpon survey, we asked three questions to open the memory banks: the best days for the number of eats, hookups, and largest tarpon, in the past and in 2025. The combined memories allowed us to compile a picture of the tarpon fishery—for the overall Florida Keys and for each region of the Keys.
The tarpon survey was conducted online from February 9 through March 30, 2026. Thirty-three guides and 86 anglers completed the survey, ranging in age from 19 – 85 years, and 2 – 60 years of tarpon fishing experience.
For the Florida Keys overall, there was a distinct peak in eats and hookups in the mid- to late-1990s, followed by a decline continuing through 2025. Tarpon size followed a similar trend.
When broken down by region, the results are a bit more variable on timing, but the overall trend shows higher historical levels with declines in more recent years.
What has caused these downturns in eats and hookups over time? Are there fewer tarpon, have their local movement patterns changed, have migration patterns changed? The maximum weight of caught tarpon peaked around 1992, with anglers describing fish of approximately 168 pounds, followed by a decline towards the present, where reported best-day fish are now closer to 90 lbs. In recent years, reported size has remained below the long-term average of approximately 100 lbs, suggesting a reduction in population size structure. We don’t yet know the answers to these questions, but this first survey gives us a solid foundation for seeking the answers.
You can check out the results of the tarpon survey, and the bonefish survey from 2025, in more detail here: https://projectseagrass.shinyapps.io/SouthFloridaBECAA/
Later this summer, we will be conducting a survey on permit.
To track changes in the fishery over time, BTT and our partners will repeat these surveys every five to seven years.