Blue Marlin

GENERAL

The Blue Marlin is a highly sought after game fish. Blue marlin, like other billfish, can rapidly change color, an effect created by pigment-containing iridophores and light-reflecting skin cells. Most often, however, the body is blue-black on top with a silvery white underside. It feeds on a wide variety of organisms near the surface, using its bill to stun, injure, or kill while knifing through a school of fish or other prey, then returns to eat the injured or stunned fish. Blue marlin are distributed throughout the tropical and subtropical waters of the Atlantic Ocean. A bluewater fish that spends the majority of its life in the open sea far from land, the Blue Marlin preys on a wide variety of marine organisms, mostly near the surface.​

FISHING

Sport fishermen first encountered blue marlin in the Bahamas in the 1920s and early 1930s, when pioneering big-game fishermen such as Van Campen Heilner and S. Kip Farrington began exploring the waters offshore of Bimini and Cat Cay. Since then, blue marlin have been renowned as one of the world’s greatest game fishes. The sportfishing pursuit of Marlin and other billfish has developed into a multimillion dollar industry. The most established sport fisheries for blue marlin are found along the eastern seaboard and the Gulf Coast of the United States, Bermuda, the Bahamas, and several other Caribbean islands.​

COOKING

The relatively high fat content of its meat makes it commercially valuable in certain markets.