[Shmag]

Originally Posted by Alex K

First off I always fish according to the regulations, and if they impose barbless so be it. However to say that mortality is higher on barbed than barbless is not necessarily the facts. During my time as host of Fishing Alberta I had the opportunity to meet several of our fisheries biologists and one in perticular was very involved in the discussions when Banff National park was considering barbless regs and Alberta had not imposed this regulation yet. Now I am going from memory with this but here is what I remember in my discussions with him.
There has been several studies on this issue and the first study released did show signs of higher mortality on fish caught with barbed treble hooks than single barbless. So with this States like Idaho and the province of BC quickly jumped on this and imposed single barbless hook laws. Later this study was reviewed by others and found to have been flawed in some way. So more studies were done and as it was explained to me no good scientist can base anything on one study for this reason nor should laws be imposed that don't have science to back them.
So after several more studies they actually found in some cases that there was a higher mortality in single barbless than in barbed trebles. Good thing this was not the first study that states and provinces based there laws. Could you imagine flies tied with treble hooks. So any way with this said when they were looking at barbless single hooks in Banff they considered quality of fishing, mortality as well as quality of the experience. Therefore this biologist recomended they did not implement the barbless rules as it might hinder kids and new anglers from enjoying the experience of landing not just hooking fish.

As others have commented the other concern I have with the anglers believing that barbless single hooks do not cause mortality, think about this when we used barbs when a fish was hooked deep we simply cut the line as close to the mouth and released the fish. still some mortality for sure but usually they would survive. Now with barbless I constantly witness anglers digging way down and over handling the fish further stressing it than if they just cut the line. Now don't get me wrong I do fish barbless and don't mind just pointing out the facts as I remember them.
Mortality is part of fishing any way we slice it.

Just my 2 cents

Best regards and Good Fishing

Alex Kreis

Interesting!!!