Florida Keys on the wing

Bonefish & Tarpon Trust is developing new methods to evaluate Florida’s tarpon fishery, including aerial surveys.

BY MONTE BURKE

In May 2021, the hedge fund manager, Paul Tudor Jones, and his guide, John Donnell, spent a week fishing for tarpon together in the Florida Keys, spending much of that time posted up on what Jones considers to be his honey hole, a spot, he says, that “has always been a ‘gimme.’” Jones, 68, has fished for tarpon in the Keys for the better part of 30 years. “It’s one of my favorite things to do in the world,” he says. “You’ve got the anticipation when you spot the fish swimming at you, the cast, the jumps. The whole thing is just so frickin’ exciting.”

But that year, his week was the worst he could ever remember. “It was the second straight year where the catch rate and the number of fish we saw was down by at least 50 percent,” says Jones. “When that happened that first year, I just chalked it up to weird weather or whatever. But two years in a row of decline? That’s a problem.” He asked around to other tarpon guides and long-time anglers in the Keys and found that many of them were experiencing the same thing.

For Jones, tarpon fishing in the Keys has become the opposite of exciting. “Based on what I’ve seen and heard, I’m really nervous about the tarpon there,” he says. “In fact, I’m terrified.” Jones, in his day job and in his philanthropy (he is a long- time supporter of Bonefish & Tarpon Trust, the cofounder of the Everglades Foundation and the founder of the Robin Hood Foundation), is not one to sit around and wait for solutions. What was desperately needed for tarpon, he believed, was some sort of population estimate. And it was needed fast. He had an idea, based on some work he had done on waterfowl and large mammals in Africa: he wanted to do an aerial survey of tarpon in the Keys during their annual migration. “At the very least, it would provide a snapshot or some sort of trend line for the population,” he says. “You can’t manage if you can’t measure.”

**

Because tarpon are not commercially harvested in the United States, they remain a mysterious species. We know a lot more about, for instance, tuna, salmon and striped bass. We do know some things, though. For starters, tarpon are ancient. Fossil data indicate that the species, in its current form, dates back to 50 million years ago. From radiometric dating, we’ve discovered, too, that individual tarpon can live for a very long time, to close to the age of 80. And we know that, despite not being a commercial species, tarpon are a very economically valuable fish: the recreational tarpon fishery in the Florida Keys generates an estimated $465 million every year.

But there are significant gaps in our scientific knowledge of the fish and the biggest have to do with spawning (no human, as of yet, has ever witnessed the spawning of tarpon) and the overall size of the population. The latter is, of course, more pertinent when it comes to the conservation of the species. And that conservation has become a pressing issue.

Tarpon have been placed on the “red list” of threatened species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a group comprised of more than 1,400 governmental and nongovernmental agencies that consults with the United Nations. Based on harvest data collected by the UN (from countries like Brazil and Venezuela, where the fish is a commercial species), the tarpon population has declined from its historical levels in the last few decades. And because tarpon live such long lives and take up to ten years to become sexually mature, they are particularly vulnerable to declines in population. All of this, coupled with the anecdotal observation of declines from longtime anglers, like Jones, and fishing guides, has brought the issue of trying to assess the current state of the population of the fish to the forefront.

There has never been a formal population stock assessment of tarpon (the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission does not even track the fish) and it is unlikely that there ever will be one, mainly because tarpon spend so much of their lives in the deepest part of the ocean, 80 percent of which remains unexplored. But there are ways to establish some sort of baseline or what BTT’s Director of Science and Conservation, Dr. Aaron Adams calls “a proxy for the health of the population.” Adams is at work on some methods to reach that baseline. Some of the most useful knowledge about any given species comes from those who interact with it the most. In the case of tarpon, that would be guides and anglers who have fished for them for decades. In scientific study parlance, these men and women have what’s known as “local ecological knowledge.” By intensely interviewing these folks and getting information about, say, where they fish and any changes in angling effort, the quality of “shots” and the number and size of the fish they are seeing, Adams can fill in some of the blanks when it comes to trends. “This is not just shooting the breeze with fishermen and guides at the dock at the end of the day,” says Adams. “It’s a highly standardized approach with detailed questions that has been shown to be extremely reliable in the study of other species.” Doing these types of interviews with long-time hunters, for instance, has been invaluable in the efforts to better conserve ducks.

The information gathered in these interviews, Adams says, will be integrated and cross-referenced with other data that are gathered, like water and habitat quality and boat traffic, to get a better overall picture. Once up and running, Adams envisions doing these assessment interviews every five years or so. “It will all help us establish where we are now and what we need to have as goals for the future,” he says.

Another component of establishing that baseline and the future goals? The aerial surveys that Jones not only suggested, but also offered to fund, starting with a two-year pilot project.

Kajiura stayed on the ocean side of the Keys, flying 95 nautical miles to the western end of the old Bahia Honda Bridge before turning around to land at the airport in Marathon. “We gassed up there and put in fresh batteries and switched out the memory cards in the cameras and then flew back to Pompano, scouting more tarpon along the way,” he says. The two legs of the survey took roughly one hour each.

During the 2022 migration season, Kajiura did nine more flights—in mostly four-to-seven day intervals—trying to time them with ideal viewing conditions (high tides and clear skies and water). After every flight, he viewed and logged the video taken from the airplane, and then cross-referenced that information with the manual counting data accumulated during the flight, to get a more accurate count of fish.

When Dr. Stephen Kajiura, a professor in the department of biological sciences at Florida Atlantic University, first heard of the BTT aerial survey project, he believed it to be “an ideal project,” he says.

Why? Well, Kajiura, a licensed pilot, had spent the previous 12 years studying the migration of blacktip sharks in South Florida, a study that included aerial surveying of the fish. “You need either a big enough animal or a big enough school in order to do these types of surveys,” he says. “Tarpon fit both categories.”

Kajiura was hired. On May 8, 2022 at 7:30 AM, with one of his students in the co-pilot seat, he took off in a Cessna 172 from Pompano Beach Airpark, just south of Boca Raton. He flew south to the Cape Florida Lighthouse on the eastern edge of Biscayne Bay. There, Kajiura descended to an altitude of 500 feet and slowed the speed of the plane down to 80 miles-per-hour. He flew along the ocean side of the Keys, staying around 1,600 feet from land. And the count began.

Kajiura’s plane was outfitted with a high-resolution GoPro Hero 11 camera on each wing. Both cameras had polarized filters to better see into the water. The camera footage was captured and logged into iPads, along with the concordant GPS coordinates. His student co-pilot was charged with doing a manual count of the tarpon seen as they flew.

There are limitations to these types of surveys, Kajiura admits. “It’s a snapshot, a moment in time,” he says. “If we flew an hour later, or took off in the afternoon instead of the morning, we’d likely get different results.” Still, this type of aerial survey is efficient and cost-effective, especially when measured against the time and manpower that would be needed for, say, a boat-based survey (which, given the water-level point of view, would likely be less accurate anyway). And it can provide some useful data. “This obviously won’t provide a true population assessment,” says BTT’s President and CEO, Jim McDuffie. “But it’s kind of a ‘canary in the coalmine’ thing. It can provide us with a dashboard that would demonstrate trends over time and inform the other work we do.”

And the second year of the pilot program will incorporate some tweaks. Most significantly, input from fishing guides will be incorporated. Before the migration begins, Kajiura plans on taking some guides up in the air with him to help map out some of the hotspots of the migration. And Kajiura, with the help of BTT, will enlist a network of on-the-water guides who will be in contact with Kajiura on the days he flies, to help direct him to fish and tell him what they are seeing from the water level. “That way, we can correlate that with what we are seeing from the air,” says Kajiura. Another major tweak will happen on the second leg of the survey, after he has gassed up at Marathon. Instead of doubling back on the ocean side of the Keys, Kajiura will fly back to Pompano on the Gulf side, relying on the guides on the water to help him locate congregations of tarpon. This will likely reduce instances of double counting and help provide information on the side of the Keys where tarpon seem to have declined more precipitously.

One of the guides who volunteered to help out is Rick Ruoff, who has been guiding in the Keys for more than five decades. Ruoff, who says he used to fly himself on occasion to look for tarpon, thinks the aerial project “will give us something to hang our hats on. We don’t need to nail down the population count to the hundreds or even the thousands. We just need an idea of relative abundance.” He says that while some guides might be reluctant to sign onto giving Kajiura on-the-water information for fear of giving up their spots, he believes that the project will easily find enough of them to make it work. In an ideal world, Ruoff adds, there would be more aerial surveys done and more frequent information assessments with guides and anglers. “The time is now,” he says.

The second year of the pilot project is scheduled to get off the ground in mid-March of this year and run until the end of June, with flights at intervals of every five days or so, depending on the weather. And while these aerial surveys will not be the silver bullet solution to figuring out what exactly is going on with the tarpon population, they will provide a useful component of some sort of measurement which, combined with the work that Adams is doing, will undoubtedly help when it comes to the management of a fish that is in dire need of it.

Monte Burke is The New York Times bestselling author of Saban, 4th And Goal and Sowbelly. His latest book, Lords of the Fly: Madness, Obsession, and the Hunt for the World-Record Tarpon, is available now. He is a contributing editor at Forbes and Garden & Gun