Can you keep a tarpon in Mississippi?

75 inches fork length, one per vessel — smaller than South Carolina's 77-inch minimum, larger than Alabama's 60-inch rule for the same fish. A tarpon over 40 inches may not be removed from the water at all unless it is being harvested within the legal limit.

MDWFP source page

What we left out on purpose

• Border waters follow an unusual rule that has no field in this schema: for black bass, bream, crappie and striped bass in waters touched by the state line, the limit is that of the adjacent state or Mississippi’s, whichever is greater. Anyone fishing the Mississippi River or Pickwick Lake needs both sets of rules.
• MDWFP’s own page links the April 2023 revision of the creel rule, while a May 2024 revision "with CHANGES" sits on the same server. Both were read; the statewide creel table is identical in the two, so nothing here depends on which is current. Anything beyond that table should be checked against the newer file.
• Mississippi sets freshwater length limits lake by lake rather than statewide — Arkabutla, Enid, Sardis, Grenada, Eagle Lake and others each have their own for crappie and bass. None of those waters is reported on by this site, so only the statewide creel figures are carried.
• Paddlefish is left out. Mississippi measures it from the front of the eye to the fork of the tail, a method this schema does not carry, and fish over 30 inches must be released.
• The reef species — snappers, groupers, amberjack, triggerfish — carry aggregate limits and federal seasons set by the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council, which change within the year. Only size and bag are published here, not the season.
• Sturgeon of every species may not be taken or possessed in any Mississippi water. It is left out rather than listed as a zero.
• DMR's reef fish table uses HTML rowspan cells to show which species share an aggregate — found and decoded from the raw page source on 2026-08-08 rather than the flattened text, which had merged several rows together ambiguously. Four deepwater grouper varieties (yellowmouth, yellowedge, misty and snowy, plus rock and red hind) share the same 4-fish grouper aggregate as red, yellowfin, black grouper and scamp but are rarely encountered and are not carried here as separate species. Queen, blackfin, silk and wenchman snapper likewise share the 10-fish snapper aggregate with mutton, gray, cubera and yellowtail but are not carried separately.
• Schoolmaster, dog and mahogany snapper share the exact same 12-inch minimum and 10-fish aggregate as gray, cubera and yellowtail snapper, already carried on this page. They are not given their own entries.
• Longbill spearfish may not be taken at all in Mississippi. Louisiana's closest relative, roundscale spearfish, carries a real 66-inch minimum with no bag limit instead — two neighbouring states treating two different billfish species differently, not an inconsistency in this data.