Lower Limits – Bigger Fish, Who’d Have Thunk It?

I figured I would have been up to full speed by now.  Not so.  I guess the doctors do know something.  For better or worse they were right when they told me it was going to take some time before I’m back to “normal”, weeks rather than days.  Two weeks since surgery and it still hurts a bit to get around and when I do, I tire quickly.  Consequently, I’ve found myself spending a lot of time in the recliner watching TV and reading.

The good side to that is I’m working my way through the backlog of fishing magazines stacked up on the office coffee table.  As I work through them I’m setting aside pieces that offer fodder for future blogs, such as this one. 

In the November issue of In-Fisherman I ran across a short piece by Gabe Gries titled, “Bluegill Bag Limits.”  It was based on a recently published article in the North American Journal of Fisheries Management, “Effects of reduced daily bag limit on bluegill size structure in Wisconsin lakes”. The gist of the piece is that reduction of limits from 25 fish to 10 fish, in general, resulted in an increase of both average and maximum size of bluegill.

Needless to say, I downloaded the article, as you can do, and gave it a read.  While not absolute, it appears that reduced harvest of bluegill results in bigger fish.  The effects are most pronounced the longer the regulations are in place and work best the more productive (fertile) the lake is. 

Then today in an email newsletter from In-Fisherman was this piece, “Managing Bluegills”.  In this piece, Dr. Hal Schramm, states that strategy producing to producing big ‘gills has been to

“(1) keep the numbers of intermediate-size bluegills sufficiently low so the surviving bluegills have plenty to eat and grow quickly to quality size and beyond; and (2) don’t over-harvest large bluegills.” 

The trick is keeping the smaller ‘gills thinned down.  Anglers typically don’t harvest enough small fish to do the job, opting for the ‘gills they should leave instead. Predators such as largemouth bass do a better job.

I’ll admit that these articles tend to reinforce what I’ve been “preaching” for some time.  Simply, if you want big fish, you can’t be harvesting limits of them.  Currently the limit for bluegill (sunfish) in Colorado is twenty, and I can assure you, it’s rare I see folks stop short of twenty fish when they’re keeping them.  Opting to kill all they can, the bigger the better. Release is typically a strategy exercised to leave small fish to “grow-up”.  Not understanding that keeping the prize breeding fish sets the stage for smaller fish.

While these pieces are geared toward bluegill, I suspect the principles apply to most fish species, especially sunfish.  The bottom-line, to me anyway, is we need to move more toward harvesting only what we need for a meal today, and even then, we need to practice releasing the “trophies” no matter the species, if, and it’s a BIG IF, we want to catch bigger fish. 

With today’s pressure on fishing resources I believe we can continue to have a fish meal on occasion, but if we want big fish, we definitely need to limit our kill, rather than killing our limit, especially of big fish.