https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzQbXGJ_1FY


I have been watching this guys videos about his pet Bass Belinda for a while now... This bass is very intelligent,, certainly has a personality and perspective...

I don't know if may people think about fish like they do Dogs or Cats but clearly they know whats going on..

At my house we have a few fish tanks,, with guppies and stuff and even those little guys can recognize people,, we have one tank with a Betta,, it knows my wife's face and voice... We had some large snails and one of them would go to the top of the tank and then release,, gliding down to the bottom,, it sure seemed like it was doing it for fun,, something to do...

Fish are not stupid,, they are certainly living a life...

I raised Koi for years at my other house and they learned to come right to the deck and eat out of my wife and I hands. Not so much when I got in the pond to do maintinance and take care of the lilly pads as I got shunned. They can be picky about things and if you piss them off they will let you know someway.

We had a couple of Koi in our pond that would come for food. Now we're tryin g to raise frogs and salamanders.

While we all have stories about how smart some fish can be, there are the dumb ones, too. Friend was sampling steelhead for scales and tissue. Caught one on a fly, did the sampling, and released it. Caught the same fish next cast.

Agency had some guys marking Springers in the Chehalis and caught the same fish twice in the same spot. Dumb or hungry you choose.

Dumb

Not going to give them a break are you!!!

Nah. I came to the conclusion about steelhead that they really are not that smart or hard to catch. What they are is really hard to locate; that's the battle in my mind.

A guy I worked with off and on over the years was a Steelhead fishing addict. He was fond of saying find Steelhead put the right thing in front of them and they will bite. Salmon sorta the same but leave out the bite part. If they are moving maybe one in whatever bite but nothing like Steelhead. If salmon are staged up it goes to just about zero with the exception being Chinook who are open to GOOD eggs. A bit of blind luck never hurts also.

Nine years of college, off and on, and one of THE most import issues in my life has been how to make fish bite! (Some of my credits have been in baseball theory, basketball rules, oudoor education, etc. But sometimes I needed an "A" to keep my gpa up.)

One does learn how to manipulate the GPA; fun, wasn't it?

did 9 years of instruction make you smarter? In Hindsight what else could you have done with that time and money?

I did a few years of JR college off and on,, was part of a CO OP where they paid for the school and it was part of the program... Sure seemed like a waste of time...

Rich G,

As you suggest very little of my college years, which were off and on with help from the G.I. Bill and a law enforcement grant, made me smarter. WhEN I began studying the administration of justice, it did help my career a lot, as a Fishcop. But I still skipped school to go fishing! Biology wasn't for me, I learned. Once you've seen one paramecium you've seen 'em all. Salmon management fascinates me, because I see that politics and agendas drives salmon management more than science.

My experience was rather dissimilar, Tug. I ended up with about seven years of college. While parts of it helped a lot in my first 12 years it was when I got my third position that all the coursework, except for calculus which I never to my knowledge used, were needed in my next position which lasted basically 16 years. I was rather amazed how it all tied together, finally. Sounds like I was lucky in what I took and where I used it.

The part folks seem to lose sight of in resource management, or maybe any management, is that much more is involved than just pure "science". You would not, in my mind, want pure "science", "what the fish need", to be the only metric we use. Law, social needs, economics, competing interests all factor in. Fascinating to work in that arena to try to get the best outcome for resources.

Some fish are likely smarter than others. I long ago read that the average largemouth bass is smarter than the average bass fisherman. I don't know much about bass fishing, so I can't say one way or the other. What most fish are is wary. Evolution reinforces that. Fish that lack wariness are more easily preyed upon than fish that are wary. The reason an individual fish may be caught repeatedly is because they have to forage for food. Evolution forces fish to choose between foraging and hiding from predation (being wary).

If Rich G's time at college was a waste of time, either he took the wrong classes, didn't apply himself to the classes he did take, or simply wasn't college material. It's not for everyone, but most people benefit from the educational opportunity. My own path through college was a long and winding one. I had no money, so had to drop out to work, drop back in, which often put me at the end of the line to sign up for classes after all the most popular or most needed classes were filled. So I ended up taking a lot of classes that weren't relevant to my eventual major. But I don't think they were a waste of time. I've got a curious mind, so knowing things has always proven useful, even when it didn't seem so at the time. Even calculus, which wasn't all that handy in fisheries, has been useful because I worked a lot with engineers. Rate of change and acceleration is worth knowing about.

Cman and Salmo,
I know exactly what both of you mean. When I started as a fishcop, I knew it was for me, and my education in justice helped. But learning about fish, and salmon and steelhead was more of an on the job education and there was a lot to learn, in fine details. Volunteering at the hatchery on my days off, talking with commercial fishermen, and listening to the public bitch was a real education.
I learned that hatchery salmon were teachable. The late, great hatchery manager, John Clayton, brought back the spring chinook run on the Kalama. Specifically, he floated sheets of plywood on the raceways to give cover for the juveniles. Hatchery workers were instructed to not walk right up to the ponds but to feed the fish from a distance so as not to spook them. Fish feeding times varied every day. He paid attention to releases. The hatchery returns went up dramatically from lows in the early '70's to several thousand a few cycles later. Sport fishing was excellent within a cycle . Maybe this situation is only appropriate for springers, or steelhead because they are largersmolts when released. But it sure did work.

In my experience working with the hatchery managers there were some really smart and inventive folks out there. And curious. Some sockeye came back so they reared sockeye. They reared coho and steelhead in the same raceway and got wonderful returns on the summers. Somebody crossed coho and Chinook and got a fish eating machine that not only cleaned out isolated ponds of unwanted invasives but they then committed piscicide on spinners.

Where I was, when I was there (over most of my career) curiosity was encouraged. See what will happen. Most of it never went anywhere because the upper levels weren't impressed but we had fun.