Quote Originally Posted by wayne johnson View Post
Yes it was troy, he was dropping off this new shantie to CAPT.. Mike this makes shantie No. 16 ready to go for this upcoming season, we also have seven sleds ready to taxi any one out again this season. Hopefully some one will top our first mate Mike king 15 lb walleye weight on a cert. scale, caught less than two miles off shore, with no one around us. Picture of this hog is on Reel Sport Charter LLC under ice fishing guide 2014.
Lets pray for ice.
Capt. Mike Reel Sport Charters, Your four season licensed guide
Reel Sport charters LLC
Reel Sport charters LLC _ Marblehead Ohio
419 265 2736
15Lbs!!!! Oh my goodness! You didn't keep it did you? Just think of all those eggs and future walleye that you killed. How dare you catch such a big fat female fish? You should be banned from fishing walleye for the rest of your life.

There are an estimated 20-30 million walleye age 2 and older in the Lake. Taking into account that a 30" + walleye has less than 20% of her eggs fertile enough to produce fry, and that she probably has roughly 100,000 eggs, that would mean that 20,000 eggs are actually fertile in that fish. Then, approximately 20% of those will actually be fertilized by a male, that gives us about 4,000 eggs from that fish will hatch. COnsidering that about 1 in 10,000 hatched fry will survive to adulthood....

For every one of those fish that you keep, you are actually killing 4/10ths of another fish, or for every 4 of those that you keep you are actually killing an additional 1.6 future fish.

According to that math, if you limit in the Winter with all really big fat females (4 man limit) then you are doing less (killing 5.6 fish) to impact the walleye population than if you go out later in the year and catch 6 post spawn fish.

But wait, some of those 6 fish you catch later that aren't currently pregnant, would be pregnant later in the year, so it is the same as catching them with or without eggs then, right?

PS - Sorry, I couldn't resist... I figure someone is bound to bring this up sooner of later in an ice fishing forum. All tongue & cheek of course!

-Matt