11 minute read
Unraveling The Mystery of the Keys Permit Fishery
Bonefish & Tarpon Trust is collaborating with the guide community to conserve the Keys’ iconic permit fishery.
By Michael Adno
During the last decade, the number and size of permit throughout the Florida Keys has winnowed, but nobody could say why.
The rumors began as a slow drip. A few dead permit floating outside the reef, some on Smathers Beach, a pile of carcasses on the ocean floor near a spawning site. The calls weren’t unusual. Dr. Ross Boucek, BTT’s Florida Keys Initiative Manager, got them all the time. But when an eternal optimist in the Lower Keys called, a guide who rarely if ever raised doubts, Boucek dropped everything to see if the rumors on the coconut telegraph were true.
His first call was to Capt. Pat Bracher, a guide who has kept a log of every fish he’s caught since 1998, forming a thorough account of the Lower Keys permit fishery spanning a quarter century. “If he’s not catching fish, there’s a damn problem,” is what sources told Boucek. “We dropped everything given the status of the permit fishery, entered his logbook data into our database, analyzed it, and presented it to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission,” Boucek said.
Downward was an understatement. The fishery climbed through peaks and valleys in the early aughts, following storms that reorganized the fishery, and in short stretches over the course of 25 years, but the number of shots that guides reported, the presence of larger schooling fish pre-spawn, and the areas they found permit had changed completely. Capt. Doug Kilpatrick, a guide from the Lower Keys and BTT board member, remembered when 20 shots a day in the fall was common. “That’s just been declining,” he said, “And now if you get eight shots, that’s considered a good day.”
Certain class sizes seem completely absent. Fish seem to take off to spawn earlier. Once permit-rich zones that were guarantees have become ghost towns. Capt. Aaron Snell, another well respected permit guide from the Lower Keys, ran through the same story of winnowing opportunities. “There used to be big floater schools around,” he said, “And you just don’t see those anymore.” Every channel in the backcountry from the Marquesas up to Sideboard Bank would hold those fish before they took off to spawn. Now, Snell said, “You can find them in one out of every five channels, maybe.”
In the early 2010s, the lion’s share of fish Bracher brought to hand were in the ten-pound range, and the data from his logs showed that after 2013, that class size seemingly disappeared. The detail haunted Boucek.
Unfortunately, it was an all too familiar story in South Florida—a confluence of a ballooning human population, ailing infrastructure, and an exponential increase in fishing pressure. BTT increased its efforts to figure out the permit fishery issues when they placed 150 acoustic tags in permit throughout the Keys beginning in 2016 following a dart-tagging program that began in 2010. Those fish revealed a pattern each spring as they congregated around Western Dry Rocks, a patch of reef southwest of Key West. It became increasingly clear this wasn’t just an important spawning site for the fishery but also a critical place for recruitment throughout the entire Keys, as currents carried larvae back through the island chain post spawn and formed the heart of the fishery.
The broad strokes of that early study showed that more and more fish returned to Western Dry Rocks each year, so BTT followed up with a threat assessment study, in large part due to concerns raised by the guide community. What they found was that charters often used Western Dry Rocks as a go-to spot to provide clients with the opportunity to catch a bucket-list fish. As fish aggregated there during the spring, guides could catch permit after permit, a far cry from the approach on the flats. Pressure on the fish during a spawn was one concern, but more importantly, the community knew that many of those fish were being lost to sharks.
“In essence, although the fishery is officially catch-and-release during spawning season, the depredation rate by sharks of 30 percent or more resulted in too many spawning permit being lost,” Boucek said. “And if multiple boats are doing that every time the fish spawn, that adds up and creates a big problem for the fishery.” The theory was straightforward. For every sexually mature fish that was lost to shark predation, that left a bruise on the fishery. And if 10 boats set up on them every day, hooked 10, and lost three to sharks, the bruise soon turned into a deep gash.
In fast forward, BTT alongside the Lower Keys Guides Association (LKGA) and a handful of NGOs built out an advocacy campaign urging the FWC to implement a seasonal closure of fishing the Western Dry Rocks between April and July. The process turned grim as workshops and public hearings grew tense. Some guides in the Lower Keys received explicit threats. Others woke up with dead permit hanging outside their house.
But in February 2021, the FWC listened to the data, and the closure took effect with the caveat that if the closure was shown to be ineffective after seven years that it would be opened back up. Now in the second year of its seasonal closure, BTT is trying to discern whether more permit are showing up at Western Dry Rocks with less fishing pressure, exactly how many, and tracking the metrics that might point to a recovery.
“What our collaborating scientists found is that the spawning aggregation really holds about twice as many permit as other aggregations in the Keys,” Boucek said of the first two years monitoring the site. “If it does work as expected,” he added, “this could be pivotal work to make that approach more comprehensive across the state, not only for permit but for snook, tarpon, and other species that aggregate to spawn and have the shark depredation issue.” But the acoustic tags, monitoring Western Dry Rocks, and advocacy were just parts in a much larger monitoring program being assembled by BTT.
In the 1970s, curiosity about permit took root slowly among just a small group of guides. The lion’s share of guides in the Keys felt the fish was uncatchable, impossible to feed. And maybe it was that sense of mystery that drew a few guides to target them, namely Steve Huff and Harry Spear, who had outsized influence on the younger guides tied up next to them in Garrison Bight. In the five decades since, the community of people devoted to this single fish has grown exponentially. The mysteries tied to them seemed to have animated the entire pursuit, cultivating a deeply intelligent and eccentric cadre of devotees.
What you’ll hear most often is that permit are the most difficult saltwater species to catch, and this is true, but it’s only a part of the allure. The guides who spend their year poling for these fish are among the most sophisticated, attuned to the ancient and increasingly subtle details that make the Florida Keys such a strange and brilliant place. Permit seem central to that sort of curiosity, the thing that stakes out the edges of this place and its sway.
Today, interest in the species, especially on the flats, has grown tenfold since its outset in the 1970s, but in the past 10 years there’s been a steady decline in the number of permit reported by guides. Snell, who’s been guiding since 2001, noted that there’s been less and less fish as well as the size of fish. “There was definitely, years ago, consistently bigger fish on the flats,” he said. “I don’t know if they’re just staying offshore, or they’re just not around anymore.”
In some areas near Key West, pressure has become non-stop as guides rotate on and off flats as if on cue. “They’re just trying to feed, and we scare them away,” Snell said. “Not only do they get scared once but they’re scared off five, ten times a day.” And alongside incessant pressure, boat traffic exploded in the wake of the pandemic. “There’s prop scars in areas boats never used to go,” he added. As always, it’s guides who form the compass for organizations like BTT, who rely in part on anecdotal evidence and observations to shape their own research.
In the last decade, Kilpatrick noted a similar downward trend. “If whatever is happening continues,” he said, “Then we’re going to have long-term bad permit fishing. We have to figure it out.” He pointed to less crabs, earlier spawns, as well as isolated pockets of poor water quality becoming more frequent. “There’s so much unknown,” he said. “We’re just going to have to keep working on it.”
After LKGA called a meeting, their members settled on four main concerns for the permit fishery. The first was increased and reckless boat traffic. Increased pressure followed. Recruitment failure from spawning sites next. And finally, they deemed forage a top concern, meaning that the prey base for the fish was either diminishing or moving elsewhere. Dr. Boucek among others at BTT took note, organizing just how they would try to study those four factors and how they affected the fishery.
Simply put, they broke it into two categories. “Either it’s a population problem, where the fish are dead,” Boucek said, “Or it’s a behavioral problem, and the fish are alive and just don’t want to be in the Lower Keys.” Guides and others are concerned that permit may be experiencing a large-scale population decline similar to what occurred with the Keys bonefish population beginning in the 1990s.
For BTT, they took all of the comments, all the rumors, the shouting and measured arguments made to LKGA and plugged it into a decision tree, inevitably settling on the same four main concerns as the guides. BTT was already tracking water quality monitoring data for the Lower Keys to better understand longterm trends, including the effect of hurricanes in 2017 and last year as well as the aging water treatment facilities strewn up and down the island chain.
And with more than 15 years of satellite imagery, BTT is also trying to map just how boat traffic and specifically how prop-scarring has altered the way fish feed from Boca Grande Channel all the way through the backcountry, and whether that coincides with reports of where fishing has gotten worse. The backend of their monitoring efforts focuses on whether the Keys are losing recruitment and what exactly is happening to what permit eat.
With over 300 measurements collected through their dart tagging program, another 150 from acoustic tags, and then the deep well of data bound up in Bracher’s logs, they’re assembling a sense of what’s a healthy size structure over the last 27 years. “That’s the first prong of this,” Boucek explained. “The second prong is looking at the food web structure to figure out if something is happening to the prey base.”
For that, BTT is using what’s called a stable isotope study, essentially clipping a small portion of a fish’s fin, sending it to a lab where a biochemical analysis reveals just what is in that fish’s diet as well as the prey’s diet. And in addition to fin clips, they’ll collect 30 fecal swabs to look more closely and DNA among fish from the Dry Tortugas to Biscayne Bay. The big question here is whether these fish are eating the same things as they do in a healthy permit fishery or are there some things missing?
“This can guide future work or help us get down to the mechanism of why they’ve left the flat and how we can fix it,” Boucek said. The target is 150 clips and 30 swabs by December 1st. “We’re going to continue collecting until we run out of money, but the short answer is we’ll be cover to cover on this by this time next year.”
Right now in Snell and Kilpatrick’s fridges are sets of vials containing fin clips that are indicators of just what’s happening in the Florida Keys. They’re a strand that ties back to those early days, and will help BTT and the guide community better understand this place and ensure the health of its iconic permit fishery. As Kilpatrick said, “We’re going to need all hands on deck.”
Michael Adno works for The New York Times, National Geographic, and The Bitter Southerner, where he won a James Beard Award in 2019. He lives in Sarasota, Florida.
