After hooking the first cobe, take time for a second look. Fish often hide beneath rays.

Cobia are opportunistic feeders, not particular at all. Their favorite foods are crabs, eels, pinfish, and in the northern Gulf, hardhead catfish. Anglers have reported finding spiny puffers and fairly large stingrays in the guts of cobia, which proves that venom and spines don’t seem to affect them at all. Cobia are just drawn by natural curiosity to gather into little pods and follow anything larger than themselves, including a boat. When trolling around wrecks and reefs, savvy anglers will assign one of the party to watch the stern for curious cobia that swim through the propwash and become easy targets for a quick bait.

When I told my story of the big cobia on the manatees to Karen Burns, a biologist with Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, she didn’t seem surprised. “Yep! That’s a cobia for you. They are definitely weird fish—the only fish in their family, I might add. Maybe no other family member would have them. Their eating patterns are really very weird.” Burns refers to cobia as “mud suckers” because of some of the stomach contents she has witnessed. “We found branches and sponges and mud, mixed with sea horses and pipe fish, as if they were vacuuming the bottom. In South Carolina, we found them full of hatchling turtles, small stingrays and skates, and lots of stingray barbs, in stomachs lined with scars from previous wounds.”

And if cobia feeding habits cause Burns to wonder, migration patterns “make me pull my hair out!” Mote has been involved in a cobia migration study since 1991, and over the years, 755 fish have been tagged. Eighty-six of those tags have been returned, and surprise to say, 40 fish moved less than 100 miles and 23 didn’t move at all. That means that only one-third migrated more than 100 miles. Burns says that while it is possible that some of the apparently non-migratory fish may have migrated and returned, these numbers still indicate cobia have nowhere near the migratory tendencies of kings, Spanish mackerel and bluefish, which are well known for massive migrations with few stragglers.

Jim Franks is a biologist from the Institute of Marine Science at the University of Mississippi in Ocean Springs, and as the Director of The Cobia Research Project is recognized as the leading authority on Gulf Coast cobia. Franks has focused his research work on cobia for over 14 years and has attended numerous tournaments to study catch results. Funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Franks is heading an angler catch-and-release program that has tagged over 12,000 cobia, so when this guy talks cobia, anglers pay attention. He agrees with Burns that scientists have yet to get a handle on cobia migration.

According to Franks, the migration of cobia from their wintering grounds near the Florida Keys to the Panhandle takes place in late March and April, so the fish found inside Tampa Bay in May and June are probably not headed north, but instead move offshore to spend the warmer summer months. April fish may be headed north. “They’re not spooky of shallow water so they move inside the Bay while its still cool, looking for food,” says Franks. “Since I have no tag returns from the Panhandle that originate inside the Bay, that’s just an educated guess as to where they go.” Franks says there is more and more conjecture amongst biologists that there is a stock of nonmigratory fish—individuals, not a subspecies—but again, that has yet to be confirmed. Adding to the mystery is the fact that in winter 1998-1999 many fish were caught all winter long in the northern gulf. “Perhaps yet another effect of El Niño?” asks Franks. “We think of cobia as a migratory species, and yet some members may not migrate, and we don’t know why yet. There are a lot of small fish up here, too. Many are undersize in the northern Gulf, which may indicate they never migrated.”

Capt. Johnnie Walker of Sarasota is responsible for tagging and releasing more than 80 percent of the fish in the Mote study, and agrees with the scientists about the mysteries of cobia migration patterns.

“We get big schools—50 to 100 fish—on the inshore artificial reefs, 200 yards to three miles off the beach, which makes me think the main body sticks close to shore during the migration. We see a few singles inside the harbor, especially around markers, crab buoys and manatees. They follow manatees and get into a feeding frenzy when the manatee starts to root around, spooking pinfish and crabs. But for some reason, our cobia in Sarasota Harbor and adjoining bays don’t follow the rays like they do in Tampa Bay. I’ve caught most of my cobia on the nearshore reefs, not in the bays. Maybe it’s because our grass patches are not as expansive as they are in Tampa Bay. Sarasota Bay is really a deeper bay than most—10-foot depths are the norm. So our artificial reefs are where we find the cobia.”

Walker uses a big chugger with the hooks removed to chum in a school of cobia. One follows it and the rest follow behind, right back to the boat. Any bait handy gets pitched to the lit-up fish and the fight is on. “You always want to have one rod rigged for cobia,” says Walker, “because when you pull up a reef fish like a snapper or grouper, chances are a cobia will follow it up from the reef.”

You may stumble across cobia any time of the year in Tampa Bay—an errant fish or two might be hanging out at a power plant or around a range finder—but if you want to target these rowdy vacuum cleaners of the sea with a good chance of taking home some tasty fillets, check out the flats on a calm sunny day and bets are on that you’ll find some, following the right kind of rays.

FS