05-15-2009, 08:57 PM
Programmed to feed
Illinois researchers find differences in bass vulnerability
By Rob Russow
ESPNOutdoors.com
Updated: May 14, 2009, 4:56 PM ET
[ul][li][url "http://myespn.go.com/conversation/story?id=4166944"]
[/url][/li][/ul]
A recent study showing that bass pass on genes making them more likely to be caught has some Elite Series anglers wondering how they made the leap against bed fishing. According to a recent study at the University of Illinois suggests anglers should think twice about catching and keeping fish during the spawning season. The study on bass genetics, done by ecology and conservation researcher David Philipp, asserts that harvesting bass off beds, even for a fishing tournament, has long-term repercussions on the health of the fishery.
The claim stems from research done by the university on central Illinois' Ridge Lake in which angling was controlled by the researchers. Every angler that went out on the lake had a livewell and all the fish were kept, measured and recorded. The bass were tagged to keep track of how many times they got caught.
"We kept track over four years of all of the angling that went on, and we have a total record — there were thousands of captures," Philipp siad. "Many fish were caught more than once. One fish was caught three times in the first two days, and another was caught 16 times in one year."
The pond was drained at the end of the study and the fish were collected. The researchers found that about 200 fish had never been caught. Researchers then divided the group of fish into High Vulnerability (HV) bass, ones that had been caught four or more times over the course of the angling study, and Low Vulnerability (LV) bass, ones that had never been caught.
Over the course of the 20-year experiment, the two lines of bass were spawned separately to produce two different lines of offspring.
"Controlled fishing experiments clearly showed that the HV offspring were more vulnerable to angling than the LV offspring," Philipp said.
The biggest outcome of the study when applied to recreational fishing is that harvesting bass that have been caught, high vulnerability bass, helps increase the proportion of low vulnerability bass that are hard to catch. Harvesting HV bass around the spawn prevents them from reproducing and opens their nest to egg predators.
"One of the big issues for concern is the explosion of tournaments," Philipp said. "Lots of bass tournaments are held during the springtime — and yes, they're released, but they could be held for up to 8 hours first. They're brought back to the dock, miles from their nest. So, basically, if a fish is caught in a tournament and brought into the boat and put into a livewell, his nest is destroyed."
The recommendation by Philipp that spring bass fishing tournaments near spawning times should require an immediate catch-and-release was met with trepidation by Elite Series angler Kelly Jordon. His main issue was not the study itself, which he has seen demonstrated in other states, but the jump from the study to the issue of bed fishing.
"To use the argument that if you take the fish off the bed, their offspring won't survive, that is very weak," Jordon said. "Those guys need to get a grip and get a clue. There have been multiple studies that show that fishing during the spawn doesn't have a lasting impact on recruitment, the amount of eggs to fry to fingerling fish that survive. That is somebody with a study who had an agenda behind it."
Jordon has seen firsthand lakes like Lake Guntersville that have a tremendous amount of fry swimming along the banks even after extensive spring fishing. Jordon argued that the reason most people go to lakes in the spring is because they can fish shallow, and those shallow fish are undoubtedly in some phase of the spawn.
"Now, the study is from Illinois and if I lived in Illinois and they are trying that hard to make the fishing better, maybe that makes sense," Jordon said. "The bass fishing is not that stellar to say the least, so that makes a lot of sense coming from the source. The best thing they can do is use those fish that bite more and breed them to use in their stocking programs."
Breeding fish and taking a close look at bass genetics is a subject that Jordon has familiarized himself with, especially since his home state boasts one of the premier organizations to study the topic, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
"They had a lake that they would stock with year-old fish and the staffers would go out there and fish," Jordon said. "When they caught one, they would punch a hole in the fin where it wouldn't hurt them. At the end of the year, a percentage of the bass had been caught 8 or 9 times and then there was a whole bunch of them that had never been caught."
Jordon pointed to high-pressure fisheries like at the recent Elite Series event on Smith Mountain Lake. He found that on those types of lakes, catching small fish wasn't very hard but boating a bigger bass became a chore.
"Smith Mountain Lake is loaded with tons of big bass and they are so hard to catch," Jordon said. "You can see whole flanker squadrons of 4- to 7-pounders sitting underneath those docks and you can't catch them with dynamite. That's why these guys are using drop shots and 4-pound test on the pressured lakes. There is definitely something there" to the validity of bass vulnerability.
Another Elite Series angler, Shaw Grigsby, echoed Jordon's comments regarding the validity of the study, but found for the most part that it didn't present any information that he hadn't heard before.
"I'm sitting here trying to think if this is something new," Grigsby said. "It's not. Research has been done here in Florida for 10 years. We actually cordoned off sections of lakes where you could not fish. They would check and recheck and assess the viability in those areas to see if it had made a difference on the overall population in the lake. They came to the conclusion that it absolutely didn't affect anything."
Catching and releasing bass only during the spawn in places like Florida might be successful, but it would create the possibility of overpopulation which would unbalance the food chain. Grigsby did acknowledge that the shorter season in the northern part of the country might make the idea more viable, but places like Michigan already have in place a closed season during the early part of the year.
Ultimately, the issue for Grigsby comes down to catching big bass, the goal of many recreational and tournament anglers.
"There have been people that have done the genetics on bass to try and build a super-bass line that are mean, aggressive and grow fast," Grigsby said. "The most important thing for bass anglers is catching a big one and during the spawn, that is a fish you may never see again and it's the only chance you have at catching it.
"I'm a big hunter and I know that nobody in the world would consider saying that you can't hunt during the rut, when bucks are chasing the does. That is when you have the best opportunity to kill the biggest buck of a lifetime and people take weeks off just for that chance."
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Illinois researchers find differences in bass vulnerability
By Rob Russow
ESPNOutdoors.com
Updated: May 14, 2009, 4:56 PM ET
[ul][li][url "http://myespn.go.com/conversation/story?id=4166944"]
[/url][/li][/ul]
A recent study showing that bass pass on genes making them more likely to be caught has some Elite Series anglers wondering how they made the leap against bed fishing. According to a recent study at the University of Illinois suggests anglers should think twice about catching and keeping fish during the spawning season. The study on bass genetics, done by ecology and conservation researcher David Philipp, asserts that harvesting bass off beds, even for a fishing tournament, has long-term repercussions on the health of the fishery.
The claim stems from research done by the university on central Illinois' Ridge Lake in which angling was controlled by the researchers. Every angler that went out on the lake had a livewell and all the fish were kept, measured and recorded. The bass were tagged to keep track of how many times they got caught.
"We kept track over four years of all of the angling that went on, and we have a total record — there were thousands of captures," Philipp siad. "Many fish were caught more than once. One fish was caught three times in the first two days, and another was caught 16 times in one year."
The pond was drained at the end of the study and the fish were collected. The researchers found that about 200 fish had never been caught. Researchers then divided the group of fish into High Vulnerability (HV) bass, ones that had been caught four or more times over the course of the angling study, and Low Vulnerability (LV) bass, ones that had never been caught.
Over the course of the 20-year experiment, the two lines of bass were spawned separately to produce two different lines of offspring.
"Controlled fishing experiments clearly showed that the HV offspring were more vulnerable to angling than the LV offspring," Philipp said.
The biggest outcome of the study when applied to recreational fishing is that harvesting bass that have been caught, high vulnerability bass, helps increase the proportion of low vulnerability bass that are hard to catch. Harvesting HV bass around the spawn prevents them from reproducing and opens their nest to egg predators.
"One of the big issues for concern is the explosion of tournaments," Philipp said. "Lots of bass tournaments are held during the springtime — and yes, they're released, but they could be held for up to 8 hours first. They're brought back to the dock, miles from their nest. So, basically, if a fish is caught in a tournament and brought into the boat and put into a livewell, his nest is destroyed."
The recommendation by Philipp that spring bass fishing tournaments near spawning times should require an immediate catch-and-release was met with trepidation by Elite Series angler Kelly Jordon. His main issue was not the study itself, which he has seen demonstrated in other states, but the jump from the study to the issue of bed fishing.
"To use the argument that if you take the fish off the bed, their offspring won't survive, that is very weak," Jordon said. "Those guys need to get a grip and get a clue. There have been multiple studies that show that fishing during the spawn doesn't have a lasting impact on recruitment, the amount of eggs to fry to fingerling fish that survive. That is somebody with a study who had an agenda behind it."
Jordon has seen firsthand lakes like Lake Guntersville that have a tremendous amount of fry swimming along the banks even after extensive spring fishing. Jordon argued that the reason most people go to lakes in the spring is because they can fish shallow, and those shallow fish are undoubtedly in some phase of the spawn.
"Now, the study is from Illinois and if I lived in Illinois and they are trying that hard to make the fishing better, maybe that makes sense," Jordon said. "The bass fishing is not that stellar to say the least, so that makes a lot of sense coming from the source. The best thing they can do is use those fish that bite more and breed them to use in their stocking programs."
Breeding fish and taking a close look at bass genetics is a subject that Jordon has familiarized himself with, especially since his home state boasts one of the premier organizations to study the topic, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
"They had a lake that they would stock with year-old fish and the staffers would go out there and fish," Jordon said. "When they caught one, they would punch a hole in the fin where it wouldn't hurt them. At the end of the year, a percentage of the bass had been caught 8 or 9 times and then there was a whole bunch of them that had never been caught."
Jordon pointed to high-pressure fisheries like at the recent Elite Series event on Smith Mountain Lake. He found that on those types of lakes, catching small fish wasn't very hard but boating a bigger bass became a chore.
"Smith Mountain Lake is loaded with tons of big bass and they are so hard to catch," Jordon said. "You can see whole flanker squadrons of 4- to 7-pounders sitting underneath those docks and you can't catch them with dynamite. That's why these guys are using drop shots and 4-pound test on the pressured lakes. There is definitely something there" to the validity of bass vulnerability.
Another Elite Series angler, Shaw Grigsby, echoed Jordon's comments regarding the validity of the study, but found for the most part that it didn't present any information that he hadn't heard before.
"I'm sitting here trying to think if this is something new," Grigsby said. "It's not. Research has been done here in Florida for 10 years. We actually cordoned off sections of lakes where you could not fish. They would check and recheck and assess the viability in those areas to see if it had made a difference on the overall population in the lake. They came to the conclusion that it absolutely didn't affect anything."
Catching and releasing bass only during the spawn in places like Florida might be successful, but it would create the possibility of overpopulation which would unbalance the food chain. Grigsby did acknowledge that the shorter season in the northern part of the country might make the idea more viable, but places like Michigan already have in place a closed season during the early part of the year.
Ultimately, the issue for Grigsby comes down to catching big bass, the goal of many recreational and tournament anglers.
"There have been people that have done the genetics on bass to try and build a super-bass line that are mean, aggressive and grow fast," Grigsby said. "The most important thing for bass anglers is catching a big one and during the spawn, that is a fish you may never see again and it's the only chance you have at catching it.
"I'm a big hunter and I know that nobody in the world would consider saying that you can't hunt during the rut, when bucks are chasing the does. That is when you have the best opportunity to kill the biggest buck of a lifetime and people take weeks off just for that chance."
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