Tarpon
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a large marine fish of the salmon family. It resembles the herring in appearance. The back is of royal blue; the sides are of burnished silver. Both for food and sport, it is considered the finest game fish in American waters. It is found in the West Indies and on the Gulf coast. It is taken to best advantage on the sandy beaches of western Florida. Entire club-houses are devoted to tarpon fishing. Club records are kept of the date, size, and tackle employed. When the waters are right, it appears on the coast. The tourist and his guide go out in the surf in a small boat. The angler uses a reel and a rod about seven feet long. He sets his hook afloat baited with a small mullet and waits in the shallows, it may be for hours, before he gets a strike. When the fish once seizes the bait, it is necessary to allow him to drag the boat until his strength is tired out. The tarpon varies towing by magnificent leaps from the water. Possibly an hour or more may be required to land. More often the fish succeeds in breaking the tackle and escaping. Many a fifty-dollar outfit has been dragged off into the Gulf. Up to 1904 the largest tarpon caught in Florida waters weighed 210 pounds. It was six feet eleven inches in length and had a girth measure of forty-five inches. The largest scales measured three and one-half by four inches. Certain points on the coast of Cuba, Corpus Christi, Texas, and Tampico, Mexico, are also tarpon-fishing grounds. The glittering scales are ordinarily the size of a silver dollar. They are much used in fancy work and are a considerable source of revenue to the fishermen. See Tunny ; Fish
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's called the tarpon in 1910 a fish of the salmon family resembling the herring; it is neither, and is now placed in its own order, Elopiformes, whose nearest relatives are the ladyfishes. The 210-pound Florida record cited for 1904 has been well beaten: the standing all-tackle record is a 286-pound fish taken off Guinea-Bissau in West Africa in 2003. Where Aiton's ranked the tarpon highly as food, modern anglers treat it as almost inedible and fish it purely for sport, releasing nearly every fish; Florida now forbids killing a tarpon without a special tag, and the species is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. Biologists have also learned that the tarpon gulps air at the surface and uses its swim bladder as a crude lung, which lets it survive in oxygen-poor backwaters.
Written for this edition, 2026.