There is more to C&R than simply being alive after release. Rivrguy tells of brood stocking Chinook. The fish lived a couple of days, and then died.

The elephant in the room is the long-term effects. There have been studies on female sturgeon egg resorption following C&R. Or, simply not dawning that year. We need to know how often a fish is caught, how that affects their fecundity, how it affects location of spawning, and a myriad of questions like that.

If sturgeon, or any resource, does not increase following a change in harvest/encounter then it is necessary to do more, not less.

It's netting sturgeon that kills them in great numbers. In the '90 s a friend of mine who was a gillnetter told me that the gillnetters on the lower Columbia in the fall were changing out the mesh size on their nets to target sturgeon. The "bycatch" was worth many times more than the coho fishery that they were carrying out. Nets were being set in the shallows where the sturgeon were known to be. My friend didn't fish the Columbia but had a place in Chinook as well as Bothell and he knew what was going on down there. He told me that that would be the end of the sturgeon because of the "bycatch" policy that our own WDFW was going with. Obviously my friend thought this was a wrong-headed policy. At the time our family had just begun to sport fish for sturgeon out of Chinook and the sturgeon were easy to catch and like others have mentioned hard to kill. I doubt very much that catch and release is harming the population much if any.

In the case on Chinook we found that doing everything by the numbers we could not broodstock them in a stressful situation. It was simply that females were pouring everything into egg development while waiting to move upstream to spawn. The water temps created a situation that the capture put such a strain on the females that they simply could not recover regardless of what we did. Males on the other hand breezed right through the process. The solution was to stop and wait for the environmental conditions to improve. It still took a huge effort to get past this issue. In fact we damn near had to treat the females unmarked or injured as if it had been seriously wounded.

It cuts across all things living. You interfere or disturb a females natural processes while in the reproductive process and nothing and I mean nothing good comes from it. Males do much much better. My wife once said she knew god was a man because if god was a she males would have the task of bringing our young into the world.

That's my point Rivrguy. We have literally decades of data on how well brood stocking of wild fish performs. While there is now way (well there is but it would takes years) to both C&R and not C&R a fish we can look at populations. What is egg-fry for a hatchery stock vs. the broomstick? What is the egg-smelt and fry-smelt for those two groups?

We always assume, at least the folks who explained it to me, that it the process of domestication that resulted in better survivals. Maybe domestication involves reducing internal responses to stress.

+1

And about ten years overdue.