Fishing for the Future
Derek LaVigne
February 16th, 2011
Catch and release is not a complex concept to grasp. Yet the majority of anglers become frustrated when they return home from a fishing trip without success. It would be wrong of me to assume that most anglers are overharvesting, but I can confidently state that a portion of license carrying fishermen are selfishly taking advantage of these resources. Keeping a fish or a limit of fish is a matter of not only legality, but also of ethics. Any persons that purchased a fishing license is entitled to keep twice the daily bag limit of any and all fish species, given that is was not caught during a closed season and with legal harvesting tactics. This is called a possession limit, and is a difficult law to enforce. Possessing more than the possession limit is illegal, unethical, and in most cases unnecessary. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources provides information and warnings about safe levels of fish consumption from Wisconsin waters. A healthy diet would contain far less servings of fish than a possession limit provides, so there is no reason to horde fish fillets. Getting back to ethics, this discussion gets a little more personal. Telling someone to release a fish because it is illegal to keep is one thing, but telling them to release it because it could detriment the population is not so easy. Anglers prefer harvesting large fish because they provide more meat per fillet than smaller fish, a more sporting challenge to catch, and an opportunity for bragging rights. However, these larger fish are long lived, mature, and make up the breeding stock in most populations. Removing too many breeding age fish from any given lake can certainly send it into a downward spiral. The notion of releasing fish to maintain a balanced, healthy population is fairly new. We’ve all seen old black and white photos of people with huge stringers of fish to be eaten. These old habits die hard. Those good old days gave little thought to the future when dealing with natural resources. We have learned now that collapsing fish populations is a reality because we’ve done it all over the state in the past. A prime example of this would be the Lake Trout demise in Lake Michigan during the 1950s. The good news is that through expensive programs, strict regulations, and time we can help ‘fix’ population degradation of fish. The truth is we shouldn’t have to! By simply returning fish that we catch back to the waters where they live we can sustain or world class fishing opportunities for future generations. As time goes on and more and more water bodies are ‘ruined’ the catch and release practice will be forced to catch on. Next time you embark on a fishing adventure, take a camera to capture your catches instead of harvesting them for the fillet board. Catch and release: It will grow on you!
2 comments:
This post really connects with me since overfishing has affected the lake that our cabin is on. It used to be no problem to go out and catch 100 crappies in a couple of hours with 3 guys, of course we did not keep all of them, but there were many people who did. Once the word got out about how good the crappie fishing was on the lake and that there was a public boat launch, it didn’t take long for the population to plummet. Now we are lucky to hook one when we go out due to overfishing and the booming pike population. I am on board with what you said, especially since you can get replicas mounts made with the use of a couple of pictures. In fact, in Alaska the government will put $500 towards any replica mount of a King salmon to really enforce the catch and release of this fish, which shows how much they value that resource.
I agree with what you are saying. I know people that also do the same thing. They obey the daily bag limit, however they have more than the possesion limit. It makes little sense to me either. Many people fill up there freezer and never even get around to eating all of them. Its too bad that people keep more than they should, as you and Aj stated, many lakes fishing quality has really gone down hill. Its hard enough to get people into outdoor activities, and with less fish to be caught, people are going to also lose intrest.
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