BassParade: Science

C&R: Too Much of a Good Thing?

SmallieTwo fairly recent pieces of research discussed the growing trend of catch and release angling in the bass fishing world and some of the potential implications, both good and bad with this trend. Have bass anglers gone overboard in their zest for this practice?

Temporal Trends in Largemouth Bass Mortality, with Fishery Implications” is the first paper by Allen, Walters and Myers. They used computer modeling to simulate various effects of annual exploitation and total mortality on population dynamics. All inputs were based on known and/or documented statistics from various locations. There has been a well documented decline in exploitation since the start of tracking in the 1970’s and running through 2001. And despite a continuing drop in fishing license sales, it is believed that numbers of anglers fishing for bass has held relatively constant in the 10-12 million angler range. As such it is believed that the exploitation decline is the result of a change in behavior as opposed to a drop in angling effort.

Voluntary release rates still vary considerably among locations and even from year to year. However, they are seeing more waters where the release rate is upwards of 90 percent. The authors suggest that “the observed temporal declines in u (annual exploitation) would lessen the responses of largemouth bass populations to length limits and make detecting the effects of length limits more difficult.” Length limits are the traditional means of (re)structuring a bass population, and these results suggest that it may become more difficult for biologists to utilize such regulations in order to accomplish their goals, especially with instances of slot limits.

Other findings relate that overall declines in exploitation ultimately result in declines in total mortality. As such, the need for length limits lessen. Additionally, this then changes the focus to other means of mortality beside harvest, so things like tournament (delayed) mortality potentially take on greater importance. It should be noted that the authors also found,  in general, there doesn’t appear to be any negative impacts at the population level being caused by tournaments.

The other paper which includes several of the same authors, “Temporal Trends in Voluntary Release of Largemouth Bass” looked at creel data over a 30-year  period for four Texas reservoirs and 2 Florida lakes. Again, voluntary release rates as high as 90 percent were documented on 2 Texas bodies of water, though one lake in the study was as low as 43 percent. However, 5 of the 6 studied waters had higher release rates than harvest rates. They were able to conclude that there appears to be a seasonal component to release rates on at least some bodies of water. Additonally, similar regulations in place (slot limits) on different bodies of water tended to yield similar overall release rates. They again questioned the future use of slot limits on waters where a high voluntary release ethic is in place. They ultimately conclude that fishery managers must no longer assume that a specific length regulation will automatically result in the intended benefit, and could possibly even upset anglers and work against their intentions. As such, “studies identifying angler attitude and motivation towards largemouth bass harvest may be useful in helping identify strategies to encourage harvest where appropriate.”

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Gitcha Bassin' Fix

The best, worst and funniest in bassin'! Jay Kumar is the guy who created BassFan.com, co-hosted Loudmouth Bass with Zona, was a B.A.S.S. senior writer and a whole lot more in bassin™. Make sure you sign up for the BassBlaster email!

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