FISHING DURING THE SPAWN
I was reading Bob Boese’s “Springtime Bream Fishing”, when I came to this part of the article….
You need to know about spawning time because you want to catch the spawning fish. Don’t worry about affecting the sunfish population, at an average of 18,000 fry hatching from each bed, it is almost impossible to over fish them. Males want to have the most centrally located nests where they have the greatest chance of fertilizing the most eggs. [A centrally located nesting bed could get more than 50,000 eggs while perimeter beds have considerably less.] Males are very protective will aggressively defend the nest from predators and females.
A few years (April 17th, 2000) back I wrote a Reader’s Cast article on “Runts”, which explained that damage that can be afflicted to your favorite warm water lake or pond by fishing during the spawn.
With every spawn there are some fish that have genetic miscoding that causes them to mature too early and stop growing. If these genetic “Runts” are allowed on the spawning beds they will pass off their damage genetic material to future fish.
The health “Big Boy” fish normally chase these smaller runts off of the spawning beds, so they do not pass on their damaged genetic inheritance.
But if you interfere with the spawn, these runts have a chance to sneak in and spread their roe over beds where the eggs have already been deposited, and the damage is done.
I am now 62 years old, born in 1949; I have been fishing since I got my first cane pole when I was 5 years old. Back then we had giant sunfish (13-inch diameter) that were the average size of caught Bluegills. Over the years because of the fishing of bream during the spawn, you do not see this size in any Bluegills. Rarely catch any that are over 6 to 9 inches in length.
Over harvesting of the bream, back when I was young it was a 60 fish limit, now it is only a 6 fish limit for bream. Too many bulls pulled off the spawning beds, and too much genetic derogation to the brood stock.
Now there are only runts where once there were giants. I wrote another Reader’s Cast article on those giants, “The Sunfish of My Youth On Lake Pokegama”
For many years I have been asking the Minnesota DNR, to stop the practice of allowing fishing during the spawn for bream. There is a ban on fishing during the spawn on other warm water fish, why not include the bream?
There is only one lake that I know of in my immediate area that still have Giant Bluegills, and I along with others are not sharing the information to other, hoping to preserve the last of the Giant Bluegills. ~Parnelli
Editor’s Note: Fishing for spawning fish is a controversial topic. Whether trout or bluegills each angler must decide for themselves about the ethics of this practice. |