“The palolo worm.”
My new yoga classmate-turned-dinner companion said it louder, as if my hearing was the problem and not my complete ignorance about what he was saying.
“Palolo. Worm,” he emphasized.
A few minutes later, veteran Florida Keys backcountry guide and fishing boat captain David Morris had his phone out, showing me photos of little reddish worms. Apparently, once a year, these marine critters rise from the reef, and migratory tarpon come to feast.
I’ve lived in the Keys for nearly eight years. I came here for coral restoration and stayed to tell stories about our environment. I spend plenty of time around scientists, divers and conservation groups. Yet somehow, I had never heard of the palolo worm hatch.
Just when you think you know a place, it entices you with another wonder.
Palolo worms are marine polychaete worms with one of the ocean’s strangest spawning strategies. During the hatch, the reproductive portion of the worm breaks away and swims to the surface, releasing eggs and sperm in synchronized swarms.
In the Keys, these events typically occur around the late May full moon and early June new moon. The best-known hatch happens near Bahia Honda, though smaller events occur throughout the island chain.
“The worm itself comes out of the bottom – typically hard bottom where there are sponges and sea fans,” said Islamorada fishing guide captain Richard Black. “It comes from healthy bottom.”
For a few evenings each year, the water can fill with thousands of drifting worms. And, where the worms go, the tarpon follow — feeding voraciously.
Black has watched the phenomenon for years. “When the worms start swimming, it almost makes the tarpon act intoxicated,” he said. “They’re sipping worms and rolling around and sliding. It’s a really awesome event.”
MidCurrent, a fly-fishing publication, has called the event “the most electric week of the saltwater calendar.”
Exactly why the hatch is so irresistible to mature tarpon remains something of a mystery. Nobody has definitively studied what role the worms play in the fish’s spawning cycle, but Black believes the event is more than just a convenient buffet. “We don’t know really enough whether that event helps bring the fish together to spawn or exactly what it does,” he said, “but the fact that you get hundreds and at times thousands of fish to come together probably means something.”
Whatever the biological explanation, the hatch brings the tarpon, and the tarpon — during this event and throughout their migratory season in the Keys — remain one of the economic engines of the Keys. A 2103 Bonefish & Tarpon Trust (BTT) study estimated the Florida Keys flats fishery, built largely around species like tarpon, bonefish and permit, generates more than $427 million annually for the local economy, supporting guides, hotels, restaurants, tackle shops and other businesses.
“Tarpon season has truly been the heartbeat of fishing guides down here since the 1950s,” Black said. “If the tarpon aren’t coming down here in April, May and June, there would be a lot slower business.”
My conversations with Morris and Black drifted toward broader questions: how connected everything in the Keys really is, and what the current state of the fisheries says about where things are headed.
“The Keys are very much connected, bayside to oceanside, Key Largo to Key West,” Black said. He pointed to Florida Bay, where seagrass die-offs and algal blooms can eventually move through bridges and channels toward the reef tract, clouding water clarity and influencing conditions offshore.
That connectivity is easy to forget when we divide ourselves into very specific industries, both guides noted.
“We need to start talking to each other,” Morris said. “We need more conversations across industries. Fish people need to talk to the coral people need to talk to seagrass people need to talk to mangrove people. Because everything is connected.”
The worms emerge from the reef. Tarpon feed on them. Anglers gather to fish for tarpon and local businesses benefit from the fishery. Every link depends on the one before it, and none of it functions in isolation. The challenge, both guides suggested, is less about diagnosing individual problems than it is about working together to address what sits underneath them.
I’m still struck by how often learning happens here, over dinner, on docks and in passing conversations between people who have spent their lives reading water most of us only glance at.
We didn’t solve anything that night. But one shared meal was enough to reignite my curiosity — not just about a strangely-named worm, but about what it would actually take for everyone who depends on these waters to see them as one system, and to act like it.
