Puerto Rico Tarpon Tagging Program

Andrew Barbour’s job description might look something like this:  Flying overnight, early morning car rides, hikes in thigh-deep mud, fishing 80 percent of the time, and jumping forty tarpon daily.  It is easy to gloss over the bad.

Through the Bonefish Tarpon & Trust’s Juvenile Tarpon Habitat Program, Barbour, a University of Florida PhD student, on a recent trip to Puerto Rico, had the opportunity to tag juvenile tarpon in “an overgrown, mosquito-infested mangrove swamp teeming with juvenile tarpon.”  Ultimately, the research sets out to determine if the tarpon from impounded estuary move to the larger fishery and thus contribute to the adult fishery.