by Don Swearingen

Created on: September 29, 2009   Last Updated: September 30, 2009

The question should be, "Should catch-and-release-fishing be part of the fisheries' management tool?" Of course it should be.

Catch and release is only one tool in the effort to maintain quality fishing for the public. Along with hatchery maintained put-and-take, bag and possession limits, size limits and seasons.

There is no one system that can solve the myriad questions fisheries' biologists face across the entire country.

In the East, there is usually plenty of water. Fisheries are more stable. Industrial pollution and over-fishing might be the problem a Department of Wildlife might face East of the Mississippi. The Atlantic shad and Atlantic Salmon come to mind as fish that have suffered population drops due to a variety of pollution and over fishing problems.

Out West? The problems are different. First of all, there isn't as much water. What water there is, is moved around to accommodate dozens of claims. Urban, agricultural, environmental.

Los Angeles is an insatiable user of water from at least two sources, and it has been sued left and right by all sorts of entities seeking restoration and compensation for the water that a lot of people feel was wrongly taken from them. In the meantime, Owens lake has water in it now. At one time it was a dry lake bed, sucked dry by Los Angeles.

The Pacific salmon fishery is in disarray because of water litigation. Farmers who cannot survive without water are up against federal courts who are placing fish above their livelihoods.

Dams that have been constructed are used for water storage, and their levels fluctuate from overfull to nearly empty. This doesn't make managing a fishery in that lake real easy. And without the dams, whole communities would become dust bowls, just as some places have because the water rights owned by the inhabitants have been bought up - and in some cases outright stolen - by larger communities.

By the same token, many of these dams, because they release their water from the bottom of the lake send water cold enough to support a cold-water fishery for many miles downstream that could not have happened without the dam.

Try to be a fisheries biologist in that environment, coupled with the usual budgetary and personnel headaches a legislature may place on you, and you can see that you're not gonna get every thing you want.

So where does catch-and-release come in? There are places in the West that still have populations of species that were never plentiful, but are still important, because they

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