Central basin perch

[MIKE_OMZIG]

My thoughts an opinions might be unpopular but I really want Lake Erie to thrive for many years to come with Yellow Perch and Walleye.

I personally do not have issue with limits on fish . If it preserves the fishery, I feel everyone should be on board. Should commercial quotas be lowered to help? Yes, absolutely. 10 ok sized perch would be dinner for two people easily, if not more.

I just watched a youtube video from 2017 I believe. These guys were fishing in April and doing quite well. But in my mind I questioned keeping a pre-spawn female obviously full of eggs. Personally, I would have thrown the females full of eggs back to in effort hopefully allow them make many more of the tasty little fish. Sure there is no regulation saying not to keep those fish but it just seemed off to me. Thinking a bit more about this as I type, if you only kept males then there would be less males to fertilize the eggs. Maybe a reduced limit during spawning season could be an option or closing the season during spawning.

I suppose the same can be discussed regarding pre-spawn Walleye as well.

[Ducker]

The lake's gonna do what the lake's gonna do, no one has much of an impact on it biologically speaking. ODNR has no idea other than limiting the take on how to manage the lakes problems. Just look at their story last year, "Theres plenty of perch, they just changed their eating habits" what a crock. Now there's a hatch problem all of a sudden.
Over fishing when numbers are down isn't good. ODNR and the feds have no control over how Canada wants to fish. We ask them to cut back, they say ok, them take theirs out of the middle. As stated in a previous post, things will come back around in the future sometime. There will be tons of perch and very few Walleyes. Then the other half will be complaining.

[fishhawk2700]

http://www.glfc.org/pubs/pressrel/LE...20%20FINAL.pdf

This is from last year. This years should be published soon. I'm sure there will be a reduction in the TAC of perch and it will be in the central basin areas. The problem is that if there are limited numbers of perch in the central basin the Canadian commercial fleet (200 license ) just pick up and move to where there are better numbers. There they WILL FILL THEIR TAC!. If MI, OH, PA, NY, filled their TAC, well you get the picture. The commercial take is worth maybe 100-120 million total Can/US. Go look up what the estimates say sport fishing brings just to the state of Ohio. I'm not going to beat a dead horse anymore but if you're interested do the research yourself. Be warned though...There is mot much info on the Canadians. They don't want anybody to know anything.