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The feeling you get rounding the corner in Piñas Bay, Panama for the first time can only be described as magical. Tropic Star Lodge — the history, records, and names that fill its guest book — has a legacy like no other sportfishing destination in the world. The feeling is matched by the landscape, where volcanic rock and dense jungle dramatically protrude from the Pacific Ocean.
We were hosted by Dr. Guy Harvey and Tropic Star Lodge for a scientific expedition to learn more about black marlin, the species so many anglers travel to this exact location to target. Made possible by the Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation and a partnership with Dr. Barbara Block’s lab at Stanford University, we brought six electronic tags to deploy that allow us to track the long-term migrations and behavior of black marlin.
We know so little about the iconic species that sits atop the famous dock at Tropic Star, an image that has become instantly recognizable in the sportfishing world. Unlike blue marlin and sailfish which inhabit both the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean, black marlin are only found in the Indo-Pacific. On top of that, they can only consistently be targeted in two places: here on the Zane Grey reef, and on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. So far, all of the black marlin tagged off Tropic Star have remained residential, not traveling more than a couple hundred kilometers away from their release location.
We set out to fish the Zane Grey reef following a record-breaking week of 179 marlin releases for the lodge, anxious to see if the luck would continue. We were fortunate it did. Captains were calling us over the radio from miles away with a feisty black marlin on the line and with anglers eager to help. After getting their official release, the crew passed over the rod and we got the fish up to our boat for tagging. This relationship between scientist and fishermen is exactly what built our tagging program 30 years ago.
Read Next: The History and Evolution of Satellite Tagging.
On our second-to-last day, we finally hooked a black marlin of our own. Having spent all week studying the differences between blues and blacks, I knew as soon as the fish jumped that it was a black. In a quick 20-minute fight I was able to catch my first-ever black marlin and tag it, too. We released this fish with new tag technology, a towed satellite tag that will transmit live position when the fish surfaces, the first of its kind to be deployed on a black marlin. Having achieved our scientific goals, I was beyond thrilled, not realizing what else the day had in store. Not even an hour later, the reel was screaming with a blue on the line. I had caught a sailfish first thing in the morning, and suddenly the possibility of getting a grand slam hit me. The fish made a mad dash towards the boat and I was convinced it was gone. Reeling as fast as I could, the line came tight again, and in 30 minutes we had a lit-up blue marlin next to the boat. An angler’s dream achievement — a grand slam.
Witnessing Guy Harvey’s passion for marine life and conservation was nothing short of awe-inspiring. Harvey’s work as an artist and my own as a biologist are faced with the same obvious challenge: marlin live underwater, and our interactions with these ocean predators are fleeting. With this in consideration, the amazement truly sets in. I take a second look at one of Harvey’s pieces featuring a black marlin chasing a school of jack crevalle and realize he has perfectly captured a predator-prey interaction that may have only lasted mere seconds. Tagging data will allow us to connect the dots between these brief interactions, but in the meantime, our only glimpse at these incredible fish are the several seconds of jumping during the fight.
