This article first appeared in Mote Magazine, a quarterly publication of Mote Marine Lab.

The article describes a couple research projects that would not be possible without help from recreational anglers. If you fish for either of the species featured in this article (bonefish and redfish) and would like to help out, please contact me. If you are interested in helping out with tarpon research, please contact me. Even if you don’t fish for these three species, chances are your local fisheries agency is doing research that would benefit from your help, so give them a call.

Figuring out where the fish are on any given day is one of the big challenges for recreational anglers. Marine gamefish also pose considerable challenges to research scientists. There’s a lot of water to cover, and marine fish tend to move around a lot. Just figuring out the amount of area that a single fish can cover in a week ‑ or a year ‑ is challenging. Adults of some species, like tarpon, can migrate long distances, such as from Mexico to Florida. Adults of other species may not be able to migrate that far, but their larvae can. Most marine gamefish spawn by a process called ‘broadcast spawning,’ whereby eggs and sperm are ejected into the open water where they mix together and sperm fertilizes egg. The larvae that hatch from the eggs can spend weeks or months floating in the open ocean as plankton before they undergo metamorphosis and move to juvenile habitats. For most species, the habitats important for juvenile fish are different than those used by adults.  Figuring out the extent that fish in different areas are related is important to management and conservation because this information is used to determine how large a geographic area must be incorporated into management of a species. Scientists are using new technological advances, from high-tech tags to genetic testing, to figure out all of this movement. Genetics is proving to be valuable tool and recreational anglers can play an integral role in this kind of research.

Bonefish Research
After hatching, bonefish larvae drift in the open ocean for 42 to 72 days, giving them plenty of time to reach Florida from anywhere in the Caribbean. This means that bonefish fisheries throughout Caribbean waters are probably interconnected, a hypothesis that we’re testing using genetic sampling techniques. If it turns out they are interconnected, that could influence the way the species are managed. For instance, in 2001, scientists discovered that there are two species of nearly identical shallow water bonefish in the Caribbean, and we do not yet know if one or both species contributes to the recreational fishery . Genetics are proving useful in determining how closely different populations of bonefish are related, and in figuring out which species of bonefish is captured by recreational anglers. Mote Marine Laboratory, Bonefish & Tarpon Unlimited and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute are collaborating on research using genetics to address these questions.
As part of this research, scientists take small clips of tissue from the dorsal fin of the bonefish for genetic analysis. The tissue grows back in a few weeks.  Anglers can help by taking their own fin clips from the fish they catch and mailing them to us for genetic analysis. The fin clip kit includes instructions on how to take a sample and where to mail it when you are done. We hope to gather fin clip samples from Florida and throughout the Caribbean.

Red Drum
Genetics are being used to address a different question about red drum, also commonly known as redfish: Is the stock enhancement program in Tampa Bay bearing fruit? In “Project Tampa Bay,” scientists determine the genetic fingerprints for the adult red drum that are captured and used as brood stock, that is, they are parents to the new generation of juveniles grown in a hatchery and then released back to the wild. Fin clips are then taken from red drum that are captured by anglers to determine how many may have come from the hatchery-raised fish. Genetic analysis answers the question because some of the parents’ individually unique genes are passed along to their offspring. Mote Marine Laboratory and Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute are collaborating on this research. So far, more than 4 million redfish have been raised in a hatchery and released into Tampa Bay with the goal of demonstrating the effectiveness and benefits of stock enhancement in a large estuarine system. The program is being closely followed by scientists in the United States and abroad because responsible stocking can be a cost-effective addition to fisheries management tools such as regulation and habitat protection and enhancement.

All material copyright Aaron Adams 2007, 2008, and beyond, unless noted.