Quote:
Originally Posted by Bighandswalker
Yea I hadn’t really considered lake numbers / anglers like that before, what about albertas size requirements for harvestable fish. I’m not a marine biologist so I may be wrong but it seems like we harvest from the spawning populations of fish with the size requirements set out. I just wonder why most other provinces go the opposite way with their sizes. Or is it again just simply the pressure on the fishery regardless of the harvest size?
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Absolutely right. I find it strange too removing the larger fish BUT if you research you'll find some interesting research out there on total bio-mass contribution towards recruitment. An example is the difference in opinion between Lake Erie fisheries managers in Canada and the US. US biologists claim that the total bio-mass of spawning walleye far outweighs the smaller percentage of production by protecting larger individual fish. Can't really argue with their take on it when the population keeps increasing to the point they have the best walleye fishery in the world nowadays and produce more 28"+ fish than can be imagined. Cold Lake lake trout would almost seem to support that theory too. All you can keep is 30" + fish and the lake produces numbers of fish that are incredible for a lake that sees no shortage of angling pressure. I surely am no biologist and have no insight from within AB fisheries as I don't know any AB biologists but I am sure it must be a very interesting position to be in given the angling pressure vs available resource in AB. I only know we enjoy eating fish and those opportunities are extremely limited in AB with the exception of stocked trout. I can catch them in SK too so I do 90% of my fishing there.