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By Steven Bardin and Gary Klein the science of fish care
How Anglers and Tournament Organizations Can Help Ensure Healthy Fish
IN A RECENT FEATURE ARTICLE POSTED ON THE MLF
Fisheries Management Division ( FMD ) section on the MLF website , veteran angler Gary Klein outlined some of the history of tournament bass fishing . In that piece , he reminded us that early bass tournaments began with 15-fish limits that were brought in on stringers , with a 100 percent mortality rate .
It was 1972 – long before catch-and-release tournaments were born and another year before the first aerated livewell became standard in a bass boat .
Since those early days of tournament fishing , the evolution of fish care has been driven by innovation , research , trial and error and harvest regulations . Eventually , it led us to the early 1990s , when the five-fish limit and 90-plus percent live release rate became the standard for bass fishing .
This evolution continued again in 2010 , when MLF put its stamp on fish care by using the catch , weigh , immediate-release competition format . This format has become the gold standard in fish care today .
continuing to enhance fish care
Fish care is extremely important to MLF – so much so that it ’ s one of the four essential pillars of the MLF Fisheries Management Division . It ’ s a broad topic that can be viewed under several lenses , depending on if you ’ re an angler , a tournament organization or a fisheries manager .
Anglers have three opportunities to impact the health of a fish : during the retrieval , handling the fish while out of the water and transporting the fish in a livewell .
Tournament organizations also have three potential opportunities to put fish care into practice : during the weigh-in , holding the fish postweigh-in and then releasing the fish back into the fishery . Over roughly 60 years , anglers and organizations have worked to perfect all these aspects so that we no longer expect mortality and can instead focus on ensuring each fish is thriving .
Due to our collective ability to care for fish , the biologists who manage our fisheries are no longer as concerned with an individual fish ; instead , they focus on the management of the entire population . They use long-term trends to determine reproductive success , growth rates , habitat usage and annual mortality . Most fisheries are managed to maximize the growth of juvenile bass to a catchable size , which in turn increases the likelihood of angler success .
Very few fisheries are managed to protect those catchable-size bass to ensure that they reach a quality or trophy-size class . Some very specific species fit into a regionally threatened category and require special regulations to protect them from overexploitation .
PHOTO BY PHOENIX MOORE
16 MAJORLEAGUEFISHING . COM | OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 2021