Too much fishing

[DomQ]

If you wanna see an overfished body of water, come to toronto and go a half hour to an hour in any direction. During the weekends man you'll be lucky if you  can find a spot to fish that hasent been slammed hard nonstop. Bass season doesnt mean a thing around here anymore and the ministry doesnt have nearly enough support to be able to handle all the people catching and keeping whatever bites. Its disgusting...

[Bassun]

I 100% agree that a fishery can be ruined by overfishing, more specifically, over keeping.  The ambiguity of "fished out" is the problem.  No, you will not remove ALL of the bass.  But, you do not need to remove all of the bass to ruin a fishery.  Slot limits work for a reason, they protect the fish that sustain a fishery.  Not all fisheries need the same slots protected; current population, geographic influence, intended consequence all play a role (and others obviously).

 

If you take two large ponds that are identical, you could manage one for "lunkers" and one for "lots of catching bass".  Over a period of years, if you follow the guidelines, you will see a significant difference in the fish caught in each pond.  You wont catch nearly as many in the lunker pond, but those you do catch (on average) will be much larger than those in the more highly populated pond; especially notable will be the big fish of the day.  Conversely, if you want to catch a lot of fish - the other pond is your best option.  Granted, pond management should go deeper than just which bass you keep and which you remove - but the impact of which bass are managed is key.

 

Why would we expect anything different?  Consider a lake or pond with only bluegill and bass (Not realistic, but shows a simple example).  If you remove too many bass, the bluegill population will explode.  One may initially think, ok great,  more bass food.  But, we often forget the bluegill need to eat too.  And they will chomp on baby bass.  So now we have pulled out the large bass which would eat the bluegill.  That also means we have removed many of the bass that would be breeding.  So already we have fewer bass, and fewer to reproduce.  Now, add in that we have MORE bluegill and they are eating MORE baby bass.  Now you are left with less mature bass, less fry, and more predation on those fry which do exist.  It's easy to extrapolate the impact to that fishery.  Smaller fisheries, naturally, are more at risk - but any fishery can be impacted to some level.  Now all that said - this is oversimplification, but I think it easily illustrates the impact we can have on any pond or lake.

[WRB]

On July 23, 2020 at 11:01 PM, txchaser said:

@basser27 When Tom says adult bass I think he means 4lbs+. Maybe a little smaller than that up north. 

Adult LMB bass are anything over 2 lbs. during the summer adult size bass can eat thier weight in prey every week. Not enough prey then the ecosystem produces skinny undersize bass before the population crashes and replenish by juevnile and baby bass until the cycle crashes agian. Carrying capacity isn't unlimited.

Tom

[TnRiver46]

On 7/23/2020 at 9:14 PM, Vilas15 said:

 

Woops

[N Florida Mike]

Ive fished my private home lake for 45 years now. It was a good numbers lake then, and is good now. The first 10-15 years , I kept nearly every bass I caught. They just never ran out. There were plenty of various kinds of bream, the biggest were mostly hand sized. In the early years, the lake was chock full of shiners too, really big ones. I caught some big bass then, up to around 9 pounds. The record is 13 1/2 though. 
Fast forward to the 2000s. Same if not better.. until the fish kill of 2011. Im convinced all the bass over 2 pounds died, and all the big bream as well, The bass have recovered well -it’s still a numbers lake , with an occasional big fish. The bream population isnt what it was and shiners are almost non existent. Reduced forage but still great fishing.
My point is that I have caught thousands of bass in the lake for many years and I catch more now than ever. It seems like if there was a genetic remembrance, I wouldnt catch much, right? Especially having caught so many in there. But it isnt the case. It could be because I have tried to manage the lake by letting all fish go over 17 inch, but occasionally keeping  some of the 12-16 inch fish.

One mystery though. Since 2011, I have caught a bass app. 1 pound or so bigger than the biggest fish from the year before - until the last 2 years. 

This illustrates it:

 

Year            biggest bass

2012            app. 2 pounds

2013            app. 3 pounds

2014                    4 pounds

2015                    5 3/4 pounds

2016                    6 1/4 pounds

2017                    7 1/4 pounds

2018                    8 pounds

2019                    7 pounds 6 oz

2020                    4 pounds 10 oz

  

 

Why am I going backwards? Are the biggest fish wising up?

Is it genetic memory?

luck?

By the way , I have caught plenty of 3-4 pound fish this year, and great numbers. I do 95% of all the fishing on the lake, and out of the other 5%, only a few bass fish. So people arent catching them out. They are also not able to get out of the lake unless we have extreme high water, and it only flows out then at one place.

Trying to understand why Im not catching bigger fish the last 2 years. At least in the same class 7-8 pounds.

Memory???

I think this goes along with the topic. If not, I apologize.

 

[DomQ]

4 hours ago, WRB said:

adult size bass can eat thier weight in prey every week. 

My girlfriend says that about me as well.