wildmanyeah
Crew Member
seems fishing with rod is the office spokes person of the study heres a video on it,
also some comments he posted on his site:
"
Several people reached out to me privately and suggested that we shouldn't be talking about these "problems", which would only be used by ENGO's as ammunition to shut down fisheries. That may be so, but I disagree because if it wasn't this than it'd be something else.
It is in every angler's best interest to find out exactly what our impacts are on fish. Rather than just saying "we have way less impacts than other groups", there are now solid data that can be brought into discussions. If there is a concern, then we can make adjustments to the way we fish to address it. If there isn't a problem, then we can actually make things even better.
This study is a great demonstration of what collaboration between the angling community and researchers can achieve. Data collection is hard work, and without the anglers' participation, we wouldn't have been able to capture a couple hundred chinook salmon in two days to sample. It is also great to have the team from Pacific Salmon Ecology and Conservation Lab at UBC so interested in sportfishing as well.
Hopefully results from the study can be used to handle some of the challenges we are facing right now. It would be fantastic to see more selective fisheries becoming available while protecting vulnerable chinook salmon stocks by lowering latent mortality of released fish."
"
Thanks!
This particular study mainly looks at how the injuries lead to mortality in the first two weeks which has never been looked at before. Previous studies had looked at the first three days. When I was at Katie's presentation last week, there were graphs of mortality % vs time for fin splits, scale loss, eye injuries, ec. Each injuries are rated so for example, there were comparisons between no eye inuries, mild eye injuries, severe eye injuries etc... There were also comparisons done with single vs treble hooks, flasher or no flasher, bait vs lures, net release vs gaff release. All very fascinating stuff. Comparison was also made for different age classes/fork lengths. Mortality did pick up after the first 3 days, some (I don't recall which ones, I think it was scale loss and fin splits) really picked up after 3 days. There were speculations that flashers would increase mortality, but so far that doesn't seem to be the case. Single hooks have done better than trebles overall as expected. Not a whole lot of difference between bait and lures as I recall. Net release is definitely much worse than gaff release. The amount of data coming out from this is quite impressive.
Katie and I plan to get together at some point in the next couple of months to do a follow up video so she can present the results I briefly summarized above. SFI is developing a set of recommended practices from these results which I will be presenting. One of the difficult question that has been discussed from this is does slot size limit really work. Would it be better to just catch and retain your limit instead of releasing 10 or 20 fish while retaining keepers? Mortality of some of the above mentioned treatment is much higher than I had thought, much higher than what Ralph suggested in the last post btw. Also, big adults survive way better than the subadults/juveniles."
also some comments he posted on his site:
"
Several people reached out to me privately and suggested that we shouldn't be talking about these "problems", which would only be used by ENGO's as ammunition to shut down fisheries. That may be so, but I disagree because if it wasn't this than it'd be something else.
It is in every angler's best interest to find out exactly what our impacts are on fish. Rather than just saying "we have way less impacts than other groups", there are now solid data that can be brought into discussions. If there is a concern, then we can make adjustments to the way we fish to address it. If there isn't a problem, then we can actually make things even better.
This study is a great demonstration of what collaboration between the angling community and researchers can achieve. Data collection is hard work, and without the anglers' participation, we wouldn't have been able to capture a couple hundred chinook salmon in two days to sample. It is also great to have the team from Pacific Salmon Ecology and Conservation Lab at UBC so interested in sportfishing as well.
Hopefully results from the study can be used to handle some of the challenges we are facing right now. It would be fantastic to see more selective fisheries becoming available while protecting vulnerable chinook salmon stocks by lowering latent mortality of released fish."
"
Thanks!
Katie and I plan to get together at some point in the next couple of months to do a follow up video so she can present the results I briefly summarized above. SFI is developing a set of recommended practices from these results which I will be presenting. One of the difficult question that has been discussed from this is does slot size limit really work. Would it be better to just catch and retain your limit instead of releasing 10 or 20 fish while retaining keepers? Mortality of some of the above mentioned treatment is much higher than I had thought, much higher than what Ralph suggested in the last post btw. Also, big adults survive way better than the subadults/juveniles."
