Quote:
Originally Posted by fish99
what about a yearly limit of harvest per person , like Chinook salmon you write each retained fish on your licence , once you harvest your fish limit for year you are in to catch and release for the rest of the season.
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That could work in conjunction with minimum size or slot limits but wouldn't work on its own because too many people would go to the close easy lakes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NSR Fisher
Lots of talk about "low fish populations" but what about the other side of the coin? Some lakes I know could use a cull of the massive swarms of 40cm walleye. Pigeon, Buck, etc etc.
On these types of lakes IMO it makes more sense to have a MAX size limit rather than a minimum.
Fish gets to 45 or 50 CM and he's now safe to keep breeding. Anything smaller usually isn't sexually mature anyways, so its fine to harvest those at a slightly higher rate.
Just my 2 cents.
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The problem with those regulations is that places like Pigeon would be fished out in no time because very few if any of the fish would reach the max size to become breeders. The lake would survive for a few years but once the older fish died off from natural causes or poor handling etc there would be nothing to replace them.
A similar example can be seen at Wabamun right now. The walleye did not directly affect the large pike population but they destroyed the younger pike population and now you can barely catch big pike because they have died off due to other reasons and have not been replaced.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Drewski Canuck
Slot sizes do work great for the simple reason that the large fish carry on breeding and the genes for the large fish get put back into the population of smaller fish, some of which make it through to breed for years to come.
BUT, there are big fish that are well past their prime, being the 9 pound plus, 20 year plus fish, that just end up being kept by the Square Hook Crowd.
After a fish has been breeding for so long, the egg fertilization potential simply drops off, and there is a lot less recruitment anyways.
How about trophy tags for lakes that use a slot size, so that the resource does in fact get utilized, and does not just go to a select group that do not have to put the over size fish back like the rest of us.
The balance of the age structure will still continue with no difference because after 20 years, there has been ample recruitment of the gene pool from these large fish for multiple generations before the large fish is removed from the age class.
Drewski
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If there were too many fish not being caught during their slot size then the limit for that particular lake could be increased.
What I would do rather then trophy tags(cause I hate the tag system) is allow people to keep the fish after they reach trophy size. So lets say regulations like one between slot size of 50-60 cm or one over 75 cm.
Having too many big fish isn't a problem to me. I have no problems with catch and release and would far rather have a lake I could go to and catch 10 lbers easily then a lake where I can keep a fish from.