I just read the abstract from a study entitled "Canada's Recreational Fisheries: The Invisible Collapse?"

Here's a quote from the abstract:

...

Data from four high profile Canadian recreational fisheries show dramatic declines over the last several decades, yet these declines have gone largely unnoticed by fishery scientists, managers, and the public. Empirical evidence demonstrates that the predatory behavior of anglers reduces angling quality to levels proportional to distance from population centers. In addition, the behavior of many fish species and the anglers who pursue them, the common management responses to depleted populations, and the ecological responses of disrupted food webs all lead to potential instability in this predator-prey interaction.
(italics mine)
...

The abstract also states "...we reject the view that recreational and commercial fisheries are inherently different and demonstrate several mechanisms that can lead to the collapse of recreational fisheries."

The study is in Fisheries , American Fisheries Society, Vol. 27, No. 1. No page numbers are given.

Any fisheries students who can grab a copy of that for me from the UW Fisheries School? (i.e., Parker, Sparkey, or Nate).

Has anyone read the full study? I'm curious as to what fisheries they're talking about and how they arrived at their conclusions.

It seems that if distance from population centers is the controlling factor that there are many other factors besides recreational fishing that would effect it, e.g., urbanization, pollution, and stream barriers.

Mainly I'm wondering if those types of things were taken into consideration, and if they were, how they were dealt with in arriving at their conclusions.

Thanks, guys. Any comments?

Fish on...

Todd.

Well, I certainly noticed how crappy the fishing was for me up there this summer - actually made me real glad that I live where I do, and yes, even for WDFW who does seem to have learned how to manage the fisheries to the point that things have actually gotten better the last few years. And Canada appears to be about where we were in the 70's as far as habitat destruction, by logging, pollution, development, etc., goes, so I don't see things improving up there very soon.

I have not read the study, but probably don't need to - it is completely obvious to me that unrestricted recreational fishing is fully capable of overexploiting the resource. They have a year round 2 king limit up there in the saltchuck, and they obviously are overexploiting them. This does bring up a point by comparing recreational to commercial fishing - yes, we can catch them all and then some, and return 15 to 75 times as much money per pound to the economy than commercial fishermen, depending upon which study you read, so why is WDFW giving fish to the commercials at such a horrendous loss, and I mean like 20 cents per pound for Willapa silvers?