TP&W TV May Feature: Mystery of the Tarpon
Passport to Texas from Texas Parks and Wildlife
The mystery of the tarpon is a story you’ll see this month on the Texas Parks and Wildlife television series– writer/producer Ron Kabele.
The funny thing about a lot of young anglers is, there’s so few tarpon left in the gulf of Mexico that a lot of them don’t even know what a tarpon looks like. But, it’s a big silver fish; when I say big, I mean ninety to two hundred and fifty pounds.
Just as recently as fifty years ago, it was a very prominent thing to see in the Gulf of Mexico. But since then, their population has just bottomed out, and the thing is, scientists just don’t know why. So, they’ve been doing research the last few years. It’s a program where anglers and scientists work together– anglers to catch the tarpon, so that the scientists can do some experiments, like what conditions do they need to reproduce. They just don’t know why the tarpon aren’t reproducing—it’s not because they’re over fished—it’s because there’s something going on in the gulf that’s causing the population to crash.
The producer who did the story went out a number of times—they never saw a tarpon. They’re really hard to catch now because there aren’t that many left. One of the biologists said, in the course of the story, that they didn’t want to happen to the tarpon to what happened to say the Attwater’s prairie chicken, where the population gets just so low that bringing the species back would be virtually impossible. And that’s what they’re trying to circumvent with this research.
The series airs on PBS stations statewide.
That’s our show for today… For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.
Passport to Texas is a 
Passport to Texas is made available by: