Originally Posted By: TwoHandedAddict
Salmo,

You're an intelligent person.

Are you really arguing that fish being hooked, played, taken out of the water ( most do it), and then possibly hooked again doesn't have a mortality rate?

I think you're a fish manager/senior bio so you know mortality rates are included in all proposed fisheries. With the sky rocketing # of guides & fishermen mortality is an issue especially when people are fishing in prime spawning habitat.





Come On SG.


THA,

Thanks for the kind words regarding my intelligence. Then I had to search back and see what I wrote over a month ago. I think if you read my post from 2/22 with some care for comprehension, it would be hard to conclude that I was arguing there is no mortality associated with responsible CNR steelhead fishing. To the extent I was arguing, I said that the mortality rate is low, which is higher than non-existent and significantly lower than high, which is the value some parties want to attach to it. My conclusions are based on observed results by me and others from wild steelhead broodstocking projects that occurred on the Skagit and Sauk Rivers in the 1980s where fish were treated less carefully than current protocol (including Sparky's law) and were held for a month or longer prior to spawning, so any delayed mortality would also have been observed. The observed incidental mortality rate in those projects ranged from 2 to 4%. That means "low" to me.

Sg