Trout Tagging Texas is an organization and program that is actively tagging and releasing speckled trout caught along the Texas coast in order to study their migration patterns, movements, growth rates and populations. Its founder, Chris McKinley, is an avid, passionate, conservation-minded angler who wanted to push for a change in coastal fisheries.
McKinley grew up near Bay City and has been in the Sargent and Matagorda areas for more than 20 years.
“Anglers still catch a lot of speckled trout up and down the coast, and big ones, too,” McKinley said. “But overall, things are not the same when compared to 10, 20 and 30 years ago. This has been especially true, at least in my opinion, since the major freeze event occurred back in February 2021. Like anybody else, I’d love nothing more than to see the quality of our speckled trout fishery improve, and I feel that practicing catch-and-release could play a major role in making that happen.”
Back in the wintertime, McKinley caught a large speckled trout that measured 31 inches and weighed 9 pounds, and it got him wondering about how many trout of that caliber were swimming around in Texas bays.
“It just really made me wonder how many times that fish had been caught before,” he said. “I wanted to know if we were catching the same fish over and over again. That’s when I decided I wanted to start tagging and releasing fish to track their movements and behaviors.”
McKinley took some time to research the best way to go about his idea, which led to the first Trout Tagging Texas speckled trout getting tagged in February of 2023. The efforts have only snowballed ever since.
The program uses four different colored tags for speckled trout that are 15 inches or longer. Specks that are caught, tagged and released on the upper coast have an orange tag. Middle coast specks are being tagged with a yellow-colored tag, and the lower coast tags are green. Fish that are caught, tagged and released in the surf have a red tag.
McKinley hopes the tag color coordination system will help track the migrations of trout that may have happened to move between different portions of the coast, or from the Gulf to an estuary, and vice versa.
“Tagging efforts initially began with me, and I quickly got the support and help of some veteran fishing guides in the Matagorda area,” McKinley said. “As we began to post about these efforts, more and more folks began reaching out about wanting to help, and there was a large conservation movement that began. It’s been great to see how many different anglers want to promote catch-and-release and help us tag speckled trout.”
Trout Tagging Texas now has a field of about 25 individuals — both fishing guides and avid recreational anglers — who are catching, tagging and releasing speckled trout up and down the Texas coast from Sabine Lake to South Padre Island.
After tagging a trout, the angler enters the tag number, the date, the time and the location into the Trout Tagging Texas database.
Additionally, the organization aims to learn more about the conditions at the time of each catch, such as weather, moon phase, tide status and what the fish was caught on.
McKinley said there have already been two reported recoveries of tagged speckled trout.
“Both occurred on the middle coast,” he elaborated. “The first tagged trout to be recovered was recaptured a little over 2 miles away from where it was tagged 21 days prior. The fish was originally caught and tagged by an angler using a soft plastic, and it was recaptured by an angler chunking a top-water lure.”
The second tagged trout was caught more than 9 miles from where it was originally tagged and released.
With about 200 speckled trout already tagged — a number that’s growing by the day — anglers can expect to see more and more tagged trout along the Texas coast.
There is a phone number for anglers to call on the tag of each speckled trout that is tagged by Trout Tagging Texas. McKinley strongly encourages anglers to promptly call the number on the tag of any recaptured fish to report it.
“We’d also love it if you released the fish again, so that we can continue to study its movements,” he said.
Trout Tagging Texas is currently waiting on approval from the IRS to become a registered nonprofit organization.
“We are also currently working on future plans to partner with CCA and the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies to further expand the efforts of the organization,” McKinley said.
