Florida Keys on the wing Bonefish & Tarpon Trust is developing new methods to evaluate Florida’s tarpon fishery, including aerial surveys. BY MONTE BURKE
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n 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-
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B O N E F I S H & T A R P O N J O U R N A L SPRING 2023
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