A marlin is a fish from the family Istiophoridae, which includes about 10 species. It has an elongated body, a spear-like snout or bill, and a long, rigid dorsal fin which extends forward to form a crest. Its common name is thought to derive from its resemblance to a sailor's marlinspike. Marlins are among the fastest marine swimmers, reaching ~110 km/h (68 mph) in short bursts. The larger species include the Atlantic blue marlin which can reach 5 m (16.4 ft) in length and 818 kg (1,803 lb) in weight and the black marlin which can reach in excess of 5 m (16.4 ft) in length and 670 kg (1,480 lb) in weight. The Atlantic blue marlin and the White marlin are endangered owing to overfishing. Blue Marlins feeds on a wide variety of organisms near the surface. It uses 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. Marlins have few predators apart from killer whales, sharks (Shortfin Mako and Great Whites), and humans. 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 that includes hundreds of companies and thousands of jobs for boat operators, boat builders, marinas, dealerships, and fishing tackle manufacturers and dealers. 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 (notably St Thomas and Puerto Rico). Recreational fishing for blue marlin also takes place in Hawaii, Brazil, Venezuela, and the Atlantic coast of Mexico, particularly the Yucatan peninsula. In the eastern Atlantic, blue marlin sport fisheries exist from the Algarve coast of Portugal in the north to Angola in the south and include the islands of the Azores, Canaries, Cape Verde, Madeira, and Ascension Island. Both Zane Grey and Ernest Hemingway, who fished for blue marlin off the Florida Keys, The Bahamas, and most famously in Cuba, wrote extensively about their pursuit. In Hemingway's novella The Old Man and the Sea, a fisherman named Santiago battles a blue marlin for three days off the coast of Cuba. -Copy and pasted from Wikipedia Courtesy of The Bellisseria Oceanographic Institute