Igfa Great Marlin Race (IGMR) – a Citizen Science, Billfish Conservation Project

Billfish are apex predators that play an important role in maintaining healthy, marine ecosystems and are also highly esteemed with recreational anglers. Unfortunately, latest stock assessments indicate that blue marlin and striped marlin are overfished, black marlin are subject to overfishing, and no stock assessments have been conducted for Indo-Pacific sailfish. The IGMR, developed by a partnership between the International Game Fish Association (IGFA) and Stanford University, pairs the recreational fishing community with cutting-edge science to learn more about the basic biology of billfish. During billfish tournaments, angling teams can sponsor pop-up archival satellite tags to be placed on fish caught and released during the event. Tags collect temperature, pressure, and light data and float to the surface after a pre-programmed data where they transmit daily summaries of stored data to Argos satellites. By exploring the link between the physical environment and the distribution of marlin, we can learn how and why their geographic and depth distribution changes seasonally, interannually, and over longer time scales such as over El Nino/La Nina cycles.  It is the hope that data generated from the IGMR can be used to enact better international conservation measures for billfish.