Pike and walleye management input

[SNAPFisher]

Hey all,
I just received an email on this topic. I'm not sure if this is new or old though and it says it closes Sep 5th. I never see it as a bad thing when input is sought. I know there are some pretty passionate members on here on management so hopefully you can provide your input:

https://talkaep.alberta.ca/northern-...ent-frameworks

[SNAPFisher]

Some questions will make you think before answering. Many of the questions are ones that are asked on here regularly. Give yourself a voice and take it

[scel]

Maybe somebody can set me straight here...

I have a PDF that I downloaded years ago. There was a legitimate scientific paper attached to it, but I cannot seem to find it.

http://wildernessnorth.com/wordpress...rowthChart.pdf

Use this document as a grain of salt guideline.

I have always been perplexed on the concept of 'minimum size limits' for walleye and pike. A 3lb walleye and a 4lb pike will be around 10 years old.

Any pike bigger than 63cm will likely be part of the active breeding population (i.e. 5 years or older). Likewise, any walleye larger than 40cm will likely be part of the breeding population.

Slot sizes make the most sense to me, but they are more difficult to enforce. Saskatchewan's policy of 'maximum retention of which only 1 may be larger than XXcm' is great, but SK has provincially a more sustainable fishery because the sheer amount of fish holding water, but they still have fairly restrictive retention with greater human population access.

What do you think of minimum size limits?

[RavYak]

Good basis for a questionnaire but they should have had comment sections on the later questions.

Reduced open seasons of 1-3 weeks would be an absolute gong show, I wouldn't even want to imagine what this would look like.

I don't get fisheries love for these tags. It is a ridiculously labour intensive process that creates a ton of work and requires close monitoring(that doesn't always happen). It is far from a perfect system as we saw with Battle Lake.

Minimum sizes works, fisheries was nice enough to tell us that previously but it is also obvious if you go fish a lake with minimum size limits. The only time it fails is if the minimum size wasn't set high enough to allow the fish to breed a few years or if there is excessive poaching or netting. Yes it is hard to catch a fish big enough in lots of these lakes but there are still lots of fish in them and they do constantly grow big enough to allow anglers to take home a meal now and then.

Slot sizes still make the most sense to me on the majority of our lakes. What I think should be done and is the simplest is the following.

On lakes that are in bad shape stock the lake to help speed up recovery and have them C&R until the population gets a foothold.

On the remainder of lakes there should be a province wide slot limit of say 50-55 or 50-60 cm and then vary the limit quantity based on lake location(lakes like Slave might be able to sustain 2 fish and remote lakes maybe 2 whereas anything close to a city leave to 1). This makes enforcement super easy and ensures sustainability across the province and would also lead to a number of more lakes with trophy fish.

Then in a small select group of lakes small numbers of tags or permanent C&R could be used to create trophy fisheries.

[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

[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.

[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.