Fillet For Friends

www.filetforfriends.com

TheBillfish Foundation works worldwide to advance the conservation of billfish and associated species to improve the health of oceans and economies. Considering the context of a planet with over seven billion human inhabitants, conservation strategies must be forward-looking and adaptive. By accounting for the roles of billfish within the marine environment as well as in relation to their interactions with humanity, TBF’s conservation campaigns maintain the flexibility to adapt to emergent threats as well as those which have historically confronted resource managers. TBF employs a multi-tiered, proactive suite of initiatives involving research— both biological and socioeconomic–education, and advocacy projects. As billfish and other highly migratory species are not confined to the territorial waters of any one nation, these strategies must also take into account the differences in culture and law inherent to the international arena. Empowered by an internationally diverse constituent network, The Billfish Foundation is uniquely equipped to do just this.

Established in 1990, The Billfish Foundation’s Tag and Release Program is the largest private billfish tagging database in the world and the cornerstone of TBF’s conservation and advocacy efforts. With more than 220,000 tag and release reports, TBF receives over 15,000 tag and release records annually from across the globe and provides vital information for billfish conservation.

The success of TBF’s Tag and Release program is contributed to the dedicated anglers and captains around the globe that voluntarily tag, release, and report their billfish catches. The deployment of traditional tags and the data gathered from recaptured billfish provides valuable scientific data to further understand growth rates, migratory patterns, habitat utilization, and postrelease survival rates. Tag and release data also provides valuable information for stock assessments that are instrumental in a time when industrial longlines represent the largest source of marlin mortality. This valuable data, much of it impossible to measure without the use of traditional tagging, provides the groundwork for conservation minded policy, scientific advancement, and gives insight into the demographics and socio-economic benefits generated from billfishing.

As tagging provides The Billfish Foundation with substance for its conservation efforts, TBF recognizes those anglers and captains that tag and release the most billfish each year at an awards ceremony at the Miami International Boat Show. The annual International Tag & Release Competition recognizes members who tag and release the most billfish by species in each