BOCA GRANDE, Fla. – Before his hook ever hit the water, Capt. Jamie Allen’s battle had begun. He whirled his fishing line like a gossamer-thin lasso and expertly plunked his lure right at the nose of a hungry tarpon.
It vanished in an instant, and the fly fisherman reeled with sudden fury.
A torpedo-like fish catapulted from the water in a wide arc, rotating mid-air and crashing down with a spray of saltwater. The 62-year-old heaved as his fishing pole bent into a horseshoe.
Known for their fight on the line, the sleek, scaly tarpon are near-mythic among anglers. Intimidating in size and energy, with mirror-like scales flashing in the sun, they’ve earned their nickname: the Silver King.
For over a century, Boca Grande Pass, the entrance to Charlotte Harbor, Florida, has been considered the tarpon capital of the world. The behemoth fish — the largest over 8 feet long and close to 300 pounds — flock from the Gulf by the thousands, forming one of the globe’s largest annual congregations during spring and summer spawning.
The species is among Florida’s most desired gamefish, caught and released just for the sport of it. Before sunshine and beaches rose in popularity, tarpon were the catalyst for state tourism.
Beside being oceanic royalty, they’re also living fossils. Fossil records indicate that tarpon existed 160 million years ago, swimming beside extinct marine reptiles like the ichthyosaurs. Modern Atlantic tarpon evolved around 23 million years ago, and their much smaller Indo-Pacific counterparts live on the other side of the world.
Highly migratory, the fish roam warm coastal waters across the globe, covering hundreds — if not thousands — of miles every year.
But today, the famed Atlantic variety is considered vulnerable to habitat loss, poor water quality and angling related deaths on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List. During the sport’s early days, anglers killed hundreds to thousands of tarpon every year.
Florida researchers are pinpointing recent stresses in their nurseries, too. The state’s coastal development and climate change imperil the estuaries and ponds baby tarpon need — and the local captains who depend on them.
The boat wobbled but held strong as Allen, a charter fishing guide of nearly three decades, reeled his tarpon in. It was a juvenile, only about 3 feet long with wide, glassy eyes.
“We’re lucky to have them,” he said.
Stealth in the shallows
If Allen had his choice, he would fish for tarpon every day. The soft-spoken captain stood at the back of a flats boat, sunscreen smeared on his cheeks.
“You’ll never, ever ever forget your first one,” he breathed, almost in awe.
He wrangled his first — maybe a 110-pounder — almost three decades ago. His then-wife hadn’t seen him smile like that since his kids were born, he said.
It was a late August morning, and sunrise leaked light over Boca Grande when Allen and Capt. Jacob Szatkowski set out into backcountry waters. They caught their first tarpon of the day not long after, and Allen seemed to watch it spar with the same sense of wonder.
They wouldn’t reel in another.
“We’ve seen it change a lot,” Allen said. “It used to be so stinkin’ easy… and then, each year it seemed to get a little harder.”
Atlantic tarpon populations have declined by at least 30% worldwide, according to the IUCN 2018 species assessment. However, there’s no formal scientific count for any region. Because the Silver King is highly migratory, it’s tough to document more than just individuals. Most of the agency’s “patchy” information about Florida was provided by anglers, who suspected a steep dropoff in tarpon over the last half a century, the IUCN reported.
When Allen first started guiding in the early 2000s, he said it wasn’t uncommon to hook, or even catch, upward of 10 fish in one trip. Now, those numbers are dwindling.
New developments are springing up in Charlotte Harbor. Boats charging through the area have “probably quadrupled,” in some cases chasing tarpon until they’re driven away, Allen said. He’s even seen some anglers chumming the water, which could be enough to shift their normal feeding habits.
“They push them and push them and push them and push them, and the fish just get tired of it,” he said.
However, the environment is changing too.
“Mind blowing” storms like last year’s Hurricanes Helene and Milton may not impact the number of fish, but 21-year-old Szatkowski said they do change the way career anglers find them. Familiar waters become foreign. The coast they’ve spent years meticulously memorizing might be altered or unrecognizable.
Though storms can also shake up fish activity and bring in extraordinary catches — there are even lower lows. Predicting tarpon movements can be less reliable, especially in submerged terrain that’s been reshaped. Where tarpon used to congregate in hordes on sandbars, he said they’ll now take to deeper channels offshore.
“We never get the chance to even cast at them because we never see them,” Szatkowski sighed.
Unlike other charter fishing boats jetting noisily along the coast, the two captains cut their engine. They took turns with a tall push pole, slicing down to the sandy bottom and propelling Szatkowski’s boat forward in typically no more than six feet of water. It was a silent substitute for motor commotion.
This was a stealth operation.
“We like to sight fish,” Allen said, his voice low. They steered around red mangrove clusters without a sound, careful not to scare tarpon haunting the shallows.
The Sheila, Szatkowski’s boat, was compact, cutting through the flats with ease. There wasn’t room for more than three adults, and just a slight shift in weight was enough to rock the deck. The bow looked like a toothy bottom jaw, rigged with rubber spikes to hold gear and catch loose fishing line.
The captains fly fish by freeing several feet of line and swinging it like a rhythmic gymnast’s ribbon, carefully aimed for a target already in their sights.
They surveyed for small ripples and bubbles, signs of tarpon breaching the surface. Called “rolling,” the evolutionary strategy allows the species to take oxygen from the air in naturally low-oxygen habitats, like the coastal ponds where they grow up — where it all begins.
For a little boy learning to fish, those ponds were the perfect playground. In Englewood, about 15 miles north of Boca Grande, Szatkowski was growing up too. While the baby tarpon followed high tides and human-made culvert pipes inland, he jumped at the opportunity to catch them.
“We would get off school and go cast netting finger mullet or little shiners and just go pond hopping,” he said.
Allen asked Szatkowski if he fished inside the residential communities of the Rotonda area.
“Yeah, we fished them all,” Szatkowski said. “There’s some big fish in a lot of them… almost adult-sized tarpon.”
Pond hopping
David Blewett and Maggie Hughes buckled their waders and strode straight into the mangroves.
Civilization disappeared, and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission researchers were engulfed in green. They moved branches and split spider webs to duck through. Dead Brazilian pepper, an invasive species, created a near impassable wall of twisted limbs on either side of them.
The mangroves opened at the edge of a pond right off a neighborhood street in the Rotonda area. Blewett, 55, charged in. His pace was quick, making the trudge through thigh-deep water and muck look deceptively easy.
“We all joke that Dave was made in mangroves because he moves so fast through them,” whispered Hughes, a 23-year-old biological scientist.
An acoustic receiver was tucked into a leafy alcove. At first glance, the listening station was just a PVC pipe jammed into the mud. But beneath the surface, a narrow cylinder was strapped to it, picking up signals from tagged juvenile tarpon swimming nearby.
This one was propped up in a pond about three miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico.
During the highest high tides and storm surges, baby tarpon can bolt through mangrove forests, marshes and human-made waterways to travel miles inland. When the tide recedes, coastal ponds are isolated again, making them a safe haven from predators.
New juveniles move in and the eldest back out during the summer rainy season or fall hurricanes, Blewett said. After that, they stay put as neighbors to southwest Florida communities.
Adept at surviving in both fresh and saltwater, juveniles can linger in ponds for years, gorging on eastern mosquitofish, rainwater killifish, sailfin mollies and sheepshead minnows. They beef up by about 2 inches per month, Blewett said, and once they’re large enough to fend for themselves, they’ll bide their time until another high tide cuts a path to freedom.
They won’t traverse the open ocean until they reach maturity at 6 feet long, lingering in rivers, creeks, canals and the estuary until then, Blewett said.
The scientists were already tracking 27 tarpon by early November, part of a two-year tagging project at FWC’s Charlotte Harbor Field Lab.
Once the juveniles are a foot long, the researchers can implant a tag — similar in size to a AA battery — in their abdomens and release them. Then, a network of listening stations all over Charlotte Harbor allows FWC to monitor their movements for about a year and a half.
Blewett waded out and slung a coil of wire over his arm, lowering an attached rod beneath the surface. He listed off readings for temperature, conductivity, pH, salinity and dissolved oxygen, which Hughes scribbled into a red binder. She tucked a No. 2 pencil behind her ear.
On the way out, the researchers checked an air pressure log in the mangroves before loading their gear back into the truck. The neighborhood was near empty, just bare plots of land. As he weaved through, Blewett pointed out human-made stormwater lakes and their hidden connections to the ponds.
Part of his work aims to assess how coastal ponds would respond to water flow under different development scenarios. Their resilience could determine tarpon survival.
“Right now, everything seems to be functioning good,” he said. “But what if every single one of these lots was built up with a house?”
Blewett's research is also helping create a GIS map of these habitats and their vulnerability, which he hopes will become part of Charlotte County’s management plan for development.
The second pond, nicknamed Middle Earth, glowed almost tangerine in the sun. They repeated the same measurements and hacked barnacles off the pipes. Their third stop, also humanmade, was closest to the estuary.
The pond was designed as a flood catchment for surrounding development but unintentionally became the “most incredible nursery,” Blewett said. It connects right to the marsh that tarpon can wriggle through.
Juveniles burbled at the other side, mini replicas of the massive adults they’ll become. Those that ventured in last summer might be between 4 and 8 inches, while those from the year before are closer to 18 inches.
“There’s over several hundred tarpon just in this little pond for there to be that much rolling,” he said. “You’ll see a little silver back.”
Tarpon can take a decade to fully mature and live for upward of 60 years — sometimes as much as 80. As captains like Allen and Szatkowski report problems catching adults, it’s difficult to pinpoint vulnerabilities in the long-lived species’ life cycle, said JoEllen Wilson, who manages the Bonefish & Tarpon Trust's juvenile tarpon habitat program.
Some roads lead back to the nurseries, she said.
In addition to the challenges posed by pollution and altered water flow, sea level rise is creeping into the picture — slowly but surely.
Salt marshes and mangroves are already encroaching on each other, and warming lets them climb north, Wilson said. Even if climate change isn’t the most immediate threat to tarpon, it will continue to transform the landscape juveniles depend on.
“So, is it right now? No. Will it be? Absolutely,” she said.
As tides flood in higher and higher, more isolated coastal ponds could become permanently connected to the ocean, opening the door for predators like bigger snook and ladyfish to attack the baby tarpon, Wilson said.
Sea level rise would also push estuaries farther inland. With human development crushed right against the coast, there’s limited space for those habitats to shift. The baby tarpon will venture closer too, potentially running out of room.
“What we’re also seeing is golf course ponds and canals and ditches and these other man-made or manipulated structures now housing juvenile tarpon,” she said. “Now they’re reaching us.”
How much farther can they go before hitting a wall of development? Though Wilson doesn’t have the answer yet, she knows that if juveniles face more difficulties surviving to adulthood, it could take decades to fully see the ripple effect on sport fishing.
On their last stop of the day, Blewett and Hughes parked on the side of the road and stepped over the metal guard rail. They shimmied through a tight mangrove passage, nothing but wild forest.
When the leaves finally parted, they emerged onto a manicured golf course. The estuary runs right through it.
Passing players mentioned they often saw tarpon flash by in the narrow waterway. Couples putted on the green while the researchers took down their data.
The climate catch
“This is the slowest day in the world,” Szatkowski sighed. “We just need one bite.”
The Sheila drifted aimlessly along Gasparilla Island. It was their third stop of the day, but the tarpon just weren’t biting.
“It’s a human issue,” Allen said. Coastal development and commercial agriculture pollute waterways while tourism booms. A constant flux of boat traffic and sport anglers puts the species in a bind, he said.
He was less convinced climate change had a part. Though it was a difficult year “weather wise,” he figured it was natural.
“Well, I’d say the last three summers have been warmer than normal,” Allen said. “But as far as climate change, I don’t think I’m a believer in that.”
Incoming tarpon, the first in hours, cut off the conversation.
“Three pack coming in off back left,” Szatkowski said.
“Four of ‘em,” Allen’s voice dropped to a murmur.
The water was murky, the fickle fish just a cluster of shadows. Szatkowski zipped his line back and forth above us, but the group was already gone.
He abandoned his post and dug out a case of lures. Some were bright, round tufts, others wispy and tiger striped. Picking another might bode well with the fish, he said.
Szatkowski palmed a chartreuse cone of marabou hair. Maybe it would be the lucky one.
At that, the chatter picked up where it left off.
“I can give you a younger perspective on that question,” Szatkowski said, gesturing to where the tarpon had just been.
There are still fish to catch, he said, but “the herds, the masses of them” seem to dissipate by July. From what he’s heard from late-career captains like Allen, tarpon sport fishing is nowhere near as successful as it used to be.
He worried the “prime” water temperature window for tarpon may be slimmer in Boca Grande.
“I think climate change, in that aspect, definitely has a way to it,” the younger man said.
The species can tolerate high temperatures — between about 70 and 90 degrees — but Szatkowski noticed the fish were tiring out faster than usual during sweltering summers. Two years ago, a marine heat wave sent water off the Florida Keys soaring to over 100 degrees.
In August, he hooked a 100-pound tarpon and landed it within five minutes, a jarringly short fight for such a strong fish. Were it cooler, he said the battle would’ve been four times that long, at least.
“You have a lot better chance of killing a fish right now if you’re not careful,” Szatkowski said. “You have to fight them quick and release them… or just not even touch them at all.”
The captains agreed a legally enforced no-touch policy might relieve stress on the species, at least in crowded passes. Posing the Silver Kings for pictures causes too much stress, Allen said.
In the past, anglers used to kill them as trophies. The earliest days of the Gulf sport were in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where hundreds fell victim every year. By 1989, it was thousands. FWC implemented a killing fee that year, later designating the species catch and release only in 2013, with few exceptions.
Now, Florida tarpon over 40 inches generally aren’t taken from the water at all.
But globally, that isn’t always the case. The highly migratory species can travel outside U.S. waters, encountering regions where they’re valued for food or other cultural significance beyond sport fishing.
Skeletal building frames and construction equipment stood on the shoreline, evidence of Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Almost a year later, the wreckage was far from repaired. Both storms spun to high strength quickly, which scientists attribute to blistering conditions in the Gulf of Mexico.
In the hurricanes’ aftermath, Allen’s charter booking dwindled. It’s enough to make a living, he said, but not nearly as good as it used to be.
The captains’ clients can stick with them for a lifetime. While Allen grapples with keeping enough business, young Szatkowski is still trying to get started. He works at a “little retail beach store” when he’s not leading charters.
Every day, he tries to understand tarpon better. And every day, he worries for the future of the sport he loves.
“Push comes to shove, there’s just plain simply not as many fish in spots that there used to be,” he said. “I have had to run a little bit farther each day, or be a little — or a lot — more patient.”
They have to travel more and try new fly-fishing lures and lines. Allen has been fishing areas he’s never explored before, even after his almost three decades guiding in Boca Grande.
“This fish drives our whole economy here,” Szatkowski said. “People like me and Jamie, it drives our whole lifestyle and livelihood. So, they need to be protected.”
Though the remaining adults migrate out after summer, younger tarpon — usually around 3 feet long — linger in backwater areas like tidal creeks year round, Allen said. Most months, he knows where to hook at least a small one for his clients.
“You know they’re always there,” he said. But if coastal habitats are compromised, they may not be.
Allen was barefoot at the bow, his loose fishing line ready for the wind.
The silence spun out for a long time.
The captains watched, waited — and caught nothing.
UF journalism senior and FCI Student Climate Fellow Rylan DiGiacomo-Rapp reported this series with support from the Florida Climate Institute.