Red drum is an economically important sport and commercial fish along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States. Continuation of these fisheries depends on reliable age and growth information for use in yield models. Red drum have been aged using length-frequency distributions, scales, otoliths, and mark-recapture methods, but none of the methods have been validated for wild populations. An on-going tagging program for red drum n Texas bays was used to determine if valid annuli are formed on scales.