Twenty years ago, when Trent Tatum and his business partner began building a fishing empire on a blue-ribbon tail water in central Wyoming, two clients could catch up to 80 fish a day. That’s roughly 40 rainbow, brown, or cutthroat trout per angler on a boat floating a dozen miles of river.
“It was absurd,” says Tatum, co-owner of the North Platte Lodge and The Reef Fly Shop.
Anglers would cast three flies below a strike indicator, offering hungry trout a veritable buffet of options drifting downstream. Most of those trout that were netted and hoisted for a picture likely lived, splashing water through the air and then disappearing back into the river. Some weren’t so lucky.
In fact, biologists on that same stretch of river found over a recent three-year study that roughly a quarter of the trout caught and released would die from hooking injuries. That’s one in four fish that would ultimately perish in a fishery that only allows anglers to keep one trout over 20 inches long.
In other words, if someone catches 40 fish in a day, they may well kill 10. The study put a different spin on the famous Lee Wulff observation that “a gamefish is too valuable to be only caught once.” And while catch and release has become popular with plenty of species from bonefish, tarpon, and permit to smallmouth bass, walleye, and even sharks, few species dominate the catch-and-release culture quite like trout. The trouble is, trout are particularly fragile. That means pairing heavily pressured trout with catch-and-release regs can pose big problems without easy solutions.
Release Requirements vs. Reality
Sam Lungren once spent 20 minutes holding a brown trout in shallow water of Montana’s iconic Madison River waiting for the creature to revive itself. It took Lungren’s hook too deep and removing it, even without a barb, caused enough damage to make the fish bleed hard. He checked the regulations. Maybe he could just conk it over the head, take it home, and eat it. But the regs were clear: catch-and-release only.
“It felt like a lapse in the regulatory regime that we couldn’t just do the right thing with that fish because it probably wasn’t going to make it,” says Lungren, a Montana-based fisherman and writer. “It became a challenge to see if I could get it to swim off.”
The fish ultimately did swim off, but Lungren is sure it didn’t last long.
Mike Duncan gets the feeling. He’s the fisheries supervisor for the Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks region that oversees the Madison River, and he’s had the same struggle with fish he or someone in his family has foul hooked, he wrote over email.
But it’s harder to justify allowing anglers to kill trout when you consider just how many people fish that river. MFWP recorded almost 340,000 fishing days on the Madison in 2024. That means, on average, about 930 people fished the river every single day of the year. If every angler started taking home even one fish each time they went out, those wild fish stocks would dwindle.
And Montana’s Fish Wildlife and Parks don’t stock that river, even though plenty of research shows it’s the best way to keep fish populations viable. So Duncan and others are occasionally left releasing fish they know won’t survive, which isn’t great for fish numbers, either. (How many, exactly, a graduate student has been studying and will report back later in the winter.)
Matt Hahn, a fisheries manager who covers the North Platte for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, just learned the toll catch and release fishing was taking on that river’s trout. It wasn’t good. Hahn and Jeff Glaid, the WGFD biologist who conducted the study, told a room full of anglers in 2024 that if regulations didn’t change, and hooking injuries to fish — like bottom jaws torn off and severe scarring — continued, the department would have to start restocking in earnest.
The Evolution of Catch and Release
While most trout streams don’t face population-level impacts from catch-and-release fishing, a growing number may, especially as a Western drought continues, rivers warm, and angling pressure increases.
Some anglers, and many fisheries managers, advocate for stricter regulations. Others say we need a mix of government regulation and personal responsibility. No one needs to catch 40 or 50 fish a day, Tatum argues (at least for adults — almost everyone carves out exceptions for kids). If regulations don’t change, says Hahn, the only options left are to start stocking more fish on the North Platte or, even more draconian, limit the number of anglers.
“I have no desire to do that,” he says. “And if everybody practices good catch and release, that wouldn’t be warranted.”
On fisheries where harvest is allowed, fly anglers should consider keeping a trout or two for dinner — especially the ones that may not live after being released.
For most of us, the appeal of catch and release is obvious. If, say, elk hunting is your favorite sport, then pulling the trigger or flinging an arrow often marks the end of the season.
“I love archery elk hunting as much as anything, but I also am borderline depressed once I kill one because it’s over,” Tatum says.
Catch-and-release fishing, on the other hand, means you get to not only pursue a species, but also feel it tug your line as it grabs your fly and even hold it before letting it go.
“I have been deeply embedded in the fly-fishing world for a long time, and by and large the people I’ve had interactions with eat walleyes or coho salmon or smallmouth bass and really treat fishing as still having some kind of primal connection to food,” says Lungren. “But I will admit that I de facto release trout and rarely ever think about whether I should bring that fish home to eat.”
Partly it’s because he just doesn’t like the taste of trout as much as other fish. But also, because that’s just what you do when fly fishing for trout — because it’s we’ve been trained to do it. Perhaps, say some anglers, it’s time for a cultural shift.
Wild Trout vs. Stocked Fish
Wildlife managers stocked rainbow, brown, and cutthroat trout for years in that blue-ribbon stretch of the North Platte River. Cutthroat trout aren’t native to the drainage, and rainbow and brown trout aren’t even native to the state.
But for decades, fisheries managers stocked trout in rivers for people to keep and fill their coolers every weekend. That meant fish stocks had to be continually refilled, or they would disappear altogether. The river could support wild spawning, though, and the public started to oppose nonstop stocking over allowing fish to naturally reproduce. So regulations slowly changed, too. Ultimately restrictions grew on what people could keep and take home, encouraging natural reproduction.
The pattern held on many Western rivers; without regulations on what people could keep, wild fisheries would simply cease to exist. Most popular rivers now allow little if any rainbow, brown, or cutthroat trout possession. Many stretches of the Madison River, for example, are catch-and-release only for rainbow trout (except for anglers under 14 years, who can keep one of any size). Fisheries managers on rivers like the Platte still held out a little, allowing any angler to keep one trout longer than 20 inches. But in many rivers, the advent of catch-and-release fishing is still the reason why we still have naturally reproducing trout at all.
I remember asking the former fisheries manager when I first started reporting on the Platte River more than 15 years ago: Why they didn’t simply make the river catch-and-release only? He told me he wanted anglers to have the opportunity to take a fish home with them if they wanted. Catch-and-release fishing, he said, and most often catch-and-release fly fishing, isn’t the only way to fish.
But as other prized rivers in the West go to catch-and-release only, the notion of releasing a fish to grow bigger can sometimes reach an uncomfortable conclusion. Without more thought to how those fish are being caught and released, they may well not survive to find the next angler’s hook.
The Current Solution? More Regulations
This summer, Wyoming’s Game and Fish Commission passed regulations that designated some sections fly-only and required anglers to pinch their barbs. (When previously surveyed most anglers had reported they already pinched their barbs. But when biologists and technicians went to the river and actually looked, according to Hahn, they discovered that very few barbs were actually pinched.)
Hahn says the regulation faced minimal backlash and easily passed through the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission. Many fly fishermen are already used to only one or two hooks with pinched barbs. Plenty of rivers across the Western U.S. and Canada have similar rules. It will be at least four to five years before WGFD conducts another study to see if the new regulations help reduce hooking injuries.
“There have been a lot of studies in scientific literature with trout, and they almost all show if catch and release is done right, mortality is basically zero,” Hahn says. “If it’s not done correctly, [mortality] can be 100 percent.”
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