BIG FISH MATTER
Planning to keep your next trophy catch? Not so fast. To continue enjoying great fishing, we need to let the lunkers go—and ensure their ongoing survival
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Measures such as catch-and-release help conserve big fish (photo: John Cleveland)REGULATION
Of course, never getting to the stage where life-and-death surgery is required is always the best course of action, which is why it’s so important to put BOFFFFs on a pedestal and protect them through special regulations, such as slot limits and mandatory catch-and-release. Getting to that point on the Nipigon has certainly contributed to the revival of the brook trout population, for example, but it wasn’t easy at first.
“It’s hard to believe, but at the time, many people did not believe you could catch and successfully release a brook trout,” Swainson says of his early work on the northern Ontario watershed. “You can’t let these fish go, they’re too fragile. That is what they believed.” So, he put fish-tagging guns in the hands of local anglers, with each tag bearing a unique individual number and a simple message: Please release me.
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“It was endless, the information we got,” Swainson says. “Anglers could see how often the fish were being caught, how small the population really was and how far the trout moved.” They also got an idea of how many fish were being retained by anglers. For example, of the just 30 brook trout tagged over two years in all of Lake Nipigon—Ontario’s largest inland lake—11 were caught again and killed. And that number may have been even higher due to non-reporting. Says Swainson: “It was mind-blowing.”
The tagging program revealed between 15 and 35% the large brook trout were caught at least twice—by the very same anglers
But the deal-sealer in terms of convincing anglers that catch-and-release works, he says, came when the tagging program revealed between 15 and 35 per cent of the large brook trout were caught at least twice, by the very same anglers who had originally tagged them. On Jessie Lake, a closed system between two dams on the Nipigon River, 10 per cent of the tagged fish were caught an astonishing three times by the same anglers who had tagged them.
With such shocking statistics staring everyone in the face, it’s no surprise special brook trout regulations designed to protect the big fish were quickly put into place. Just as anticipated, the BOFFFFs, with their remarkable “storage effect,” have since brought the fishery back to its previous glory. Still, Swainson worries about anglers with short memories forgetting their history lessons.
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“With today’s angling pressure on the system,” he frets, “the fishery will quickly collapse if the regulations are ever relaxed.” His observation serves as both a warning and a ringing endorsement for protecting big, old, fat, fertile, female fish. If we give them good homes and protect them when they’re vulnerable, these rock stars of the fishing world will provide us with world-class angling forever. Fail to do so, however, and we ignore them at our peril.