Inshore & surf · Saltwater
Permit
Trachinotus falcatus
Western Atlantic native, ranging from Massachusetts and southern Florida through the Bahamas and Caribbean to Brazil, and most abundant in southern Florida. A jack (Carangidae), not a flats specialist by ancestry - the same species uses shallow seagrass foraging ground and nearshore hard structure through its life.
Also called Atlantic permit, great pompano, round pompano.
- Inshore
- Nearshore
- Regulated context
- 4 of 4 overlays reviewed
- Reviewed 2026-08-27
Before you target this fish
Regulated context — check the rules for the exact water
Where this applies Florida (FWC) state and adjacent federal waters, with a separate zoned rule set in south Florida; other jurisdictions across the Caribbean and western Atlantic manage the species independently.
The reviewed context, unedited
Permit are NOT catch-and-release only in Florida, and a record that says otherwise is wrong. FWC manages them with a zoned rule set: inside a defined Special Permit Zone in south Florida state and adjacent federal waters there is a minimum size, a one-fish daily bag, a two-fish vessel limit and a summer harvest closure; outside that zone there is a fork-length slot, a larger daily bag and a year-round season. Agency pages disagree on the closure start month - one FWC page gives 1 April to 31 July, another describes a May-through-July closure - so the closure dates must be verified against current rule text rather than taken from this record. All directed commercial harvest was eliminated in 2011. A survey of anglers and guides reported significant decline in permit fishing quality from 1995 through 2019, with the decline more pronounced on flats than on reef habitat.
Rules for this fish change at a state line and sometimes inside one. Check the ones that apply to the exact water you are standing on before you act on anything here — this record is biology, not permission.
Take this somewhere
This page is the record. The reading is what happens when you add water, a season and a temperature to it — that is where the families below get ranked against each other instead of just listed.
Those three links carry the fish and nothing else. No conditions were declared on this page, so none travel, and the link says so rather than sending an empty reading.
The half nobody publishes
What this record does not know
Everything else on this page comes from a named agency or peer-reviewed source. This is the other side of that: the questions a reviewer went looking for an answer to and came back without, and the fields the record leaves empty because filling them would mean guessing.
It is here rather than at the bottom because a page that only shows what it knows is easy to read as a page that knows everything. For Permit there are 24 of them.
Named by a reviewer
20Somebody looked for this and wrote down that they did not find it.
- Behaviour
No sourced relationship between permit behavior and tide stage on flats. This is the single largest gap in the record and it matters most for exactly the fishery this species is reviewed for.
Nobody has sourced:
- No diel pattern reported by any source consulted; dielTendency is recorded as 'mixed' to mark absence of evidence, not a finding
- No thermal tolerance or preference range located; the catalog thermal block is omitted
- No sourced water-clarity, cold-front or angling-pressure response
- Territoriality and aggression not addressed by any source consulted
- Telemetry findings derive from one south Florida study system and one broad-scale connectivity study; transferability elsewhere in the range is not established
- Identification
Nobody has sourced:
- Maximum size figures disagree substantially between sources (48 in / 79 lb versus 122 cm / 36 kg); no reconciled maximum
- No sourced catch-size distribution for the recreational fishery
- Sexual dimorphism not addressed beyond size at maturity; the Florida growth study found no statistically significant difference between male and female growth models (p = 0.059)
- Regional color variation and spawning coloration not sourced
- Forage
No stomach-content or stable-isotope diet study for adult permit was located; the diet here rests on agency and museum synthesis, not primary diet data. Status is partial for that reason.
Nobody has sourced:
- No quantified ranking of crustaceans against mollusks
- No seasonal diet data, so seasonalDiet is omitted
- Echinoderms (sea urchins) are a sourced adult prey group with no class in the closed forage vocabulary
- Season
No tide-stage relationship in any entry, because no source consulted measured one. For a flats sight-cast species this is a material gap.
Nobody has sourced:
- No sourced thermal context for any season
- No sourced seasonal diet or forage emphasis; forageEmphasis is absent throughout
- No sourced light sensitivity or diel pattern for any season
- Seasonal occupancy data come from a single south Florida study system; northern-range seasonality rests only on FWC's warm-months statement
- The autumn occupancy decline is confounded by a hurricane in the study year
Absent from the record
4No reviewer wrote a gap here. The field is simply empty, which is its own answer.
- Water temperature
No agency or peer-reviewed temperature band for Permit was found that a review would accept. The reading runs without one rather than borrowing a number from a related fish.
- Identification
No reviewed image. A photograph is only in this catalog when an agency or a named creator labelled the subject, and nobody has cleared one for this species yet.
- Presentation
No species-specific weighting rule is reviewed for Permit. Its ranking comes from the shared model — season, temperature, water type, holding and forage — with nothing added for this fish in particular.
- Population context
No regional population profile is registered. The species-level reading stands on its own; it does not silently become a local one.
Where the record puts it
Water and range
Inshore
3 reviewed holding classes- Grass flat
- Sand hole
- Channel edge
Nearshore
3 reviewed holding classes- Nearshore reef
- Artificial reef
- Wreck
DepthTwo-part. Foraging is shallow - predominantly under about 5 m over nearshore seagrass flats, with juveniles in water under 0.6 m. The same individuals make repeated trips to nearshore and offshore hard structure; 75% of telemetered fish were detected in both flats and reef habitat, and adults are recorded to about 30 m.
Moving waterNot sourced as a tide-stage relationship, which is a real hole in this record. What is sourced is a depth constraint: permit forage predominantly in shallow nearshore seagrass flats under about 5 m, and the acoustic-telemetry work that examined environmental drivers of residency tested temperature, season and lunar phase rather than tide.
LightNot sourced. No diel pattern was reported by the telemetry studies consulted.
Thermal band
Temperature
No reviewed temperature band
Nobody publishes a preferred or active temperature range for Permit that a review would accept. Borrowing one from a related fish would look like knowledge and behave like a guess, so the reading runs without it and says which parts of the answer that weakens.
How it uses water
Behaviour
The social pattern changes with size, so a record written around schooling behavior will misdescribe the largest fish. Aggregation at nearshore reef structure during the reproductive period is a separate, reproductive phenomenon and is treated as conservation context.
Adults are benthic crushers: granular teeth on the tongue backed by pharyngeal bony plates, used on hard-shelled prey rooted out of the substrate. Juveniles begin as planktivores and shift to benthic prey with size.
Not sourced. No diel pattern was reported in the telemetry studies consulted, and 'mixed' here records the absence of evidence rather than a finding. Treat as a gap.
Seasonal activityFlats and reef occupancy peaked March through September, with the highest numbers of individuals in April and May, and a marked decline in residency in late fall. One study's autumn decline coincided with a major hurricane, so the autumn signal is partly confounded.
Temperature-driven behaviourWeakly sourced. Residency was generally consistent across water temperatures overall, though residency-temperature relationships varied between sites. No thermal tolerance limits or preference range were located, so the catalog thermal block is omitted rather than guessed.
Depth movementPermit move repeatedly between shallow foraging ground and deeper hard structure: 75% of telemetered individuals were detected in both nearshore flats and reef habitat. Foraging is predominantly in water under about 5 m; adults are recorded to about 30 m.
Facing the currentNot sourced.
Water levelNot sourced, and this is the most important hole in the record. Permit foraging is depth-limited to shallow seagrass, which necessarily makes tide height a constraint on access, but no source consulted measured permit behavior against tide stage. The acoustic-telemetry work that modelled environmental drivers of residency examined temperature, season and lunar phase, not tide.
CoverShallow seagrass and sand flats for foraging; nearshore and offshore hard structure - natural reef, artificial reef, wrecks and platforms - for the rest of the pattern. Residency was significantly higher at artificial reefs than at seagrass flats or natural reefs.
Open waterMovements between flats and reef habitat are frequent and repeated rather than a one-way seasonal migration.
Predator avoidanceBull, lemon and hammerhead sharks and great barracuda are the identified predators. Published work reports that angling-related depredation by sharks at offshore aggregation sites can be high.
Spawning (conservation context)Conservation context only. Permit are multiple-batch spawners. Florida sampling documented spawning at least during May-July, with agency sourcing giving spring or summer and noting possible year-round spawning in south Florida. Reproduction occurs away from the flats, and gonad indices correlate with that movement rather than with flats residency. Florida closes harvest inside a defined Special Permit Zone across part of this period. Aggregation sites, the depths they form at, the lunar cue the source reports and the size of the schools are all excluded from this catalog.
Where the general rule stops
- Nearshore hard structure is both a legitimate year-round habitat class for permit and the habitat class in which they aggregate to spawn. This catalog lists the structure class and never a site, and treats the reproductive season as conservation context. Published work reports that shark depredation of hooked permit at offshore aggregation sites can be high, which compounds the cost of fishing them there during the spawning period.
- This record does not include coordinates or named reefs, wrecks or flats, and we never give them.
What it can eat
Forage
- Crustaceans
- Mollusks
Adult permit are hard-shelled benthic feeders. Agency sourcing states permit feed primarily on crabs and mollusks; museum sourcing describes larger adults taking gastropods, sea urchins, bivalves and crabs, rooting through substrate to extract them and crushing with granular tongue teeth backed by pharyngeal bony plates. Both crustaceans and mollusks belong in the closed vocabulary here and both are supported. Sea urchins are echinoderms and have no class in the closed vocabulary, so that part of the diet is unrepresentable in this field and is recorded here in text only. Capacity is not a current bait event.
- Feeding style
- Opportunistic
- Feeding zone
- Benthic
By life stage
- Juvenile
- Planktivorous at first - copepods, mysids, larval shrimp and amphipods - then shifting to small benthic prey such as mole crabs and clams.
- Adult
- Benthic crustaceans and mollusks: crabs, bivalves and gastropods, with sea urchins taken by larger adults.
Prey sizeNot sourced as a quantified relationship. The described progression from planktonic prey to mole crabs and clams to gastropods, urchins, bivalves and crabs implies prey size tracks growth, but no source consulted measured it.
Ontogenetic shiftPlanktivory to benthic hard-shell feeding. This is the clearest sourced diet statement for the species and it is qualitative rather than quantitative.
SubstitutionsNot sourced. No regional or habitat-specific forage comparison was located.
Diet capacity is not proof that a prey event is occurring. Observed current forage still comes from a user observation or Hatch Match.
Through the year
Season
Winter
- Where they sit
- Shallow seagrass and sand flats, inshore channels and holes; nearshore and offshore hard structure.
- Movement
- Outside the documented March-September occupancy peak. Agency sourcing records permit in south Florida year-round but in northern and central Florida only during warm months.
What that changesFlats sight cast on shallow foraging ground; structure vertical over nearshore hard structure.
What would count against it
- assuming a tide-stage rule this record does not have a source for
- reading a low-occupancy period as an absence
Early spring
- Where they sit
- Shallow seagrass and sand flats; nearshore hard structure.
- Movement
- Start of the documented occupancy peak - March is the first month of the March-September window.
What that changesFlats sight cast; live or natural bait suspension.
What would count against it
- treating rising occupancy as a bite prediction
Approaching the reproductive period. Florida's Special Permit Zone harvest closure begins in this part of the year, and agency pages disagree on whether it starts in April or May - verify current rule text.
Spring
- Where they sit
- Shallow seagrass and sand flats for foraging; nearshore and offshore reef structure through the reproductive period.
- Movement
- Highest number of individuals recorded on both flats and reef in April and May.
- Feeding
- Benthic crushing of crustaceans and mollusks on shallow foraging ground.
What that changesFlats sight cast on foraging ground; tidal drift bait along the same edges when water is moving.
What would count against it
- using reef occupancy during the reproductive period as a reason to fish structure
Peer-reviewed sampling documents spawning at least from May, and Florida closes Special Permit Zone harvest across part of this period; verify the current rule with FWC. Aggregation sites, and the cue the literature reports for them, are excluded from this catalog.
Early summer
- Where they sit
- Shallow seagrass and sand flats; nearshore reef structure.
- Movement
- Inside the March-September occupancy peak.
What that changesFlats sight cast.
What would count against it
- converting documented reproductive-period reef residency into holding water
Inside the documented May-July spawning period and inside the Florida Special Permit Zone harvest closure. Shark depredation of hooked permit at offshore aggregation sites is reported as high during this period.
Summer
- Where they sit
- Shallow seagrass and sand flats; nearshore hard structure.
- Movement
- Occupancy peak continues through September.
What that changesFlats sight cast; live or natural bait suspension on shallow foraging ground.
What would count against it
- assuming diet capacity indicates a current crab or shellfish event
Spawning documented at least through July; agency sourcing raises the possibility of year-round spawning in south Florida.
Late summer
- Where they sit
- Shallow seagrass and sand flats; nearshore hard structure.
- Movement
- End of the documented occupancy peak.
What that changesFlats sight cast; structure vertical over nearshore hard structure.
What would count against it
- reading the end of the occupancy peak as a movement to a named place
Fall
- Where they sit
- Shallow seagrass and sand flats; nearshore hard structure.
- Movement
- A distinct decline in flats occupancy was recorded in autumn, but in that study year it coincided with a major hurricane, so the autumn signal is partly confounded and should not be read as a clean seasonal rule.
What that changesFlats sight cast; structure vertical.
What would count against it
- treating the confounded autumn decline as an established seasonal pattern
Late fall
- Where they sit
- Shallow seagrass and sand flats; nearshore hard structure.
- Movement
- Marked decline in residency in late fall across the multi-site study.
What that changesStructure vertical over nearshore hard structure; flats sight cast where fish are still present.
What would count against it
- assuming the species has left the system rather than reduced residency
Spawning · Spring, Early summer, Summer
Conservation context only. Peer-reviewed Florida work documented spawning at least during May-July, with agency sourcing giving spring or summer and noting possible year-round spawning in south Florida; permit are multiple-batch spawners. Reproduction occurs offshore over reef structure in roughly 33-100 ft. Telemetry found residency at natural reef sites rising toward the full moon, a probable spawning cue, and monthly gonad indices correlating with reef residency but not with flats residency. Florida closes harvest inside a defined Special Permit Zone across part of this period. Spawning aggregations are excluded from targeting in this catalog.
Recorded as conservation context. No spawning site, staging concentration or migration bottleneck is named anywhere in this catalog, because naming one is how a population gets fished out.
Telling it apart
Identification
What to look at
- Anterior dorsal and anal lobes are elongate and sickle-shaped; the dorsal lobe is longer than in Florida pompano.
- Body depth is more pronounced than in Florida pompano or palometa of comparable length.
- Silver sides with a bluish-green to brown back; fins dark grey to black; belly sometimes yellow, and dark patches occur on some fish.
- Granular teeth are present on the tongue, with pharyngeal bony plates behind - crushing dentition, not cutting dentition.
- Reported fin counts of 17-21 soft dorsal rays and 16-19 soft anal rays.
- Grows far larger than Florida pompano; size alone separates large adults.
- Average adult length
- Maturity at about 19.1 in fork length for males and 21.5 in for females; 50% maturity has been estimated at 486 mm FL (2.3 years) for males and 547 mm FL (3.1 years) for females. Predicted lengths from Florida age data are about 12.6 in FL at age 1 and 25.4 in FL at age 5.
- Common angling size
- Not sourced as a catch-size distribution. Agency sourcing describes adults commonly exceeding 3 ft and 15-20 lb.
- Typical weight
- Adults commonly 15-20 lb per agency sourcing; not resolved as a distribution.
- Maximum documented
- Sources differ. A museum source gives maxima of 48 in and 79 lb; another compiled source gives 122 cm and 36 kg. The oldest aged fish in the Florida study was a 23-year-old male at 781 mm.
- Longevity
- At least 23 years - the oldest fish aged in the Florida study - with the authors noting larger individuals exist in the wild so longevity may exceed that.
What it gets confused with
- Florida pompano (Trachinotus carolinus)
- Smaller at maturity and at maximum size, with a shallower body and a shorter anterior dorsal lobe. Juvenile pompano carry yellow on the chin, fins and belly where juvenile permit carry orange.
- Palometa (Trachinotus goodei)
- Much smaller, with far more extreme, thread-like elongate dorsal and anal lobes and dark vertical bars on the side. Body depth is less pronounced than permit.
What follows from all of that
Presentation families
Inshore
Flats sight cast
Present to a fish you have actually seen, leading it so the bait arrives without landing on it.
- spot first, cast second
- lead the fish
- quiet entry
- strip or retrieve across its path
What it asks of the tackle
- Depth control
- Low
- Sensitivity
- High
- Casting distance
- Moderate
- Weight range
- Unweighted to 1/4 oz
- Cover resistance
- Low
- Line visibility
- Low
- Retie frequency
- Moderate
Live / natural bait suspension
Present a natural food form with enough life or scent to hold in a station without looking mechanical.
- keep it alive or fresh
- match the holding depth
- minimize hardware bulk
- detect without pulling it away
What it asks of the tackle
- Depth control
- High
- Sensitivity
- High
- Casting distance
- Short to moderate
- Weight range
- As light as conditions allow
- Cover resistance
- Moderate
- Line visibility
- Low
- Retie frequency
- High
Tidal drift bait
Let a natural bait travel at the speed of the tide along an edge fish are feeding on.
- match weight to the run
- stay in the seam
- let it swing at the end
- reset up-tide
What it asks of the tackle
- Depth control
- Moderate
- Sensitivity
- High
- Casting distance
- Short to moderate
- Weight range
- 1/8–1 oz
- Cover resistance
- Moderate
- Line visibility
- Low
- Retie frequency
- High
Nearshore
Structure vertical
Hold a presentation in the water column directly over hard structure and stay there as the boat moves.
- stay vertical
- hold the depth band
- short lifts
- reset when the line angles
What it asks of the tackle
- Depth control
- High
- Sensitivity
- High
- Casting distance
- None
- Weight range
- 2–16 oz
- Cover resistance
- High
- Line visibility
- Secondary
- Retie frequency
- High
Live / natural bait suspension
Present a natural food form with enough life or scent to hold in a station without looking mechanical.
- keep it alive or fresh
- match the holding depth
- minimize hardware bulk
- detect without pulling it away
What it asks of the tackle
- Depth control
- High
- Sensitivity
- High
- Casting distance
- Short to moderate
- Weight range
- As light as conditions allow
- Cover resistance
- Moderate
- Line visibility
- Low
- Retie frequency
- High
Drop presentation
Let a bait fall on a controlled line into cover, along a wall, or through a hole in vegetation.
- place then fall
- watch the line
- hold at depth
- short hop only after the fall
What it asks of the tackle
- Depth control
- High
- Sensitivity
- High
- Casting distance
- Short
- Weight range
- 1/16–3/8 oz
- Cover resistance
- High
- Line visibility
- Low
- Retie frequency
- High
What moves them for this fish
No species-specific rule is reviewed for Permit. Its ranking comes from the shared model — season, temperature, water type, holding water, forage — with nothing added for this fish in particular. That is a gap, not a claim that nothing is special about it.
Where every sentence came from
Sources
Agency
Used for habitat, thermal band and presentation families. Read 2026-08-27, next check 2026-11-27.
Agency
Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission - A Review of Florida's Permit Fishery
Used for habitat, thermal band and presentation families. Read 2026-08-27, next check 2026-11-27.
Agency
Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission - Permit life history
Used for identification. Read 2026-08-30, next check 2026-11-29.
Agency
Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission - Permit life history and Permit status and trends
Used for forage. Read 2026-08-30, next check 2026-12-12.
Agency
Used for season. Read 2026-08-30, next check 2026-11-18.
Peer reviewed
Used for habitat, thermal band and presentation families; identification; behaviour; season. Read 2026-08-30, next check 2026-11-27.
Peer reviewed
Used for habitat, thermal band and presentation families; behaviour; season. Read 2026-08-30, next check 2026-11-27.
Peer reviewed
Used for habitat, thermal band and presentation families; behaviour; season. Read 2026-08-30, next check 2026-11-27.
Peer reviewed
Used for habitat, thermal band and presentation families; behaviour; season. Read 2026-08-30, next check 2026-11-27.
Synthesis
Florida Museum of Natural History - Trachinotus falcatus species profile
Used for habitat, thermal band and presentation families; identification; forage. Read 2026-08-30, next check 2026-11-27.
Synthesis
Jagassar 2015, UWI Online Guide to the Animals of Trinidad and Tobago - Trachinotus falcatus
Used for identification. Read 2026-08-30, next check 2026-11-29.
Synthesis
Used for behaviour. Read 2026-08-30, next check 2026-11-15.
Synthesis
Used for forage. Read 2026-08-30, next check 2026-12-12.
A source with no link predates the rule that one has to carry a URL. It is still a real citation and still checkable; it just takes a search rather than a click, and that is worth knowing before you rely on it.