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Thread: Erie's best days???
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04-30-2016, 11:17 AM #11
Very well put.
On Lake Michigan (SE WI) we have the same complaints… stock more salmon, stock more salmon so I can get back to catching more. Problem is there is so much less food for them, the can't survive. When you dig into the very deep studies and research that goes into a balanced system, your outlook on will change drastically. I spent a half day reading reports and viewing videos on it all… and have far more respect for the efforts that go into it all now.
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05-01-2016, 11:06 PM #12
it's certainly food for thought and I see the logic in a lot of what you say; that said, answer me this: if the fact that in the 80s and 90s most fish were big was an indicator that they were being artificially supported by a freak run of shad and other baitfish abounding, to the point that they were eating their own young.... well when was the last time you caught a small sheephead? I'd easily say that a quarter of the sheephead I get are fish ohio size, and I probably got 1-2 last year that were under 15". So what's "artificially" keeping them large?
Point being, we overfished the walleye back in the day when I was a kid and a teenager, just as my parents and granparents did with perch and the blue pike (to extinction). Day was you could go out and get a stringer of perch, 50, 60 of 'em per person, and they were all good size, 10 inches or so with the odd bigger one. Getting the little 4" babies was unheard of.
Based on the stories (and pictures) I have seen from perch fishing in the 50s and 60s, my own experience walleye fishing when young, and my current experience with sheephead, I'd postulate that big fish means a healthy fishery. Catching fish too small to keep (or be worth keeping) is an indication of an unhealthy fishery. Either it's overfished, or underfed, or something.
Now I do note that the average size of the walleye I get is on the upswing. I think things are slowly improving. But it really did crash and burn there for a few years.
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