Have you ever wished the size limit on walleyes was just an inch or two shorter? Have you ever wanted the number of crappies you can keep per day to bump up a bit? In the opposite direction, have you ever thought allowing anglers to keep five bass or six trout was surely going to deplete the lake or river of fish you love? If you’re a diehard angler, it’s highly likely that at some point, there has been a size or bag limit that you disagreed with, but have you ever given any thought to why it was set that way in the first place?
It’s a common assumption that state wildlife agencies make the rules based solely on the fish. The reality is far different. For the last 28 years, veteran Vermont fisheries biologist Shawn Good has had a heavy hand in figuring out regulations, and although the process can vary state to state, rest assured his methods are similar to your state’s. I asked Good to give me a peek behind the curtain of setting limits, and what I learned might give you a new appreciation for the struggle it can be, and how ultimately every rule set is designed to improve your fishing — despite a pervasive belief that wildlife officials are enemies, not friends.
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The Human Element
Calls and emails from anglers blaming Good for ruining their enjoyment of fishing are all part of the gig. He’s received tons in his career. After so many years, he doesn’t let them bother him, because he knows all his team’s hard work collecting data, surveying, and listening to angler feedback is always aimed at making fishing more enjoyable for everybody. But trying to please “everybody” is what makes the task so challenging. It’s Good’s job to manage all fish species. But as individual anglers, we tend to only care about the ones we personally target.
“Anglers all have different interests and expectations,” he says. “And so, what we’re trying to do is manage fishing opportunities in a general basis across a state for everybody to enjoy. There are some people don’t give a damn about trout in high mountain streams, but there are certain people that do. Some people fish in a lake, but they don’t really care about pike. As a matter of fact, they might hate pike and they don’t want them because they steal their lures. But you want to manage pike for the people who do want to catch those pike and maybe they want to catch a trophy pike. Then there are other people who fish in that lake and think, ‘I’m just after the bass. I don’t care what you do with pike or perch or crappie or anything like that.’”
Good’s job is far more about managing people than fish. It’s a delicate balance of trying to keep everyone happy.
Good’s job is far more about managing people than fish. It’s a delicate balance of trying to keep everyone happy. Anglers who put themselves in a box by saying “I’m just a bass guy,” however, are the ones that tend to take regulation changes so personally, but whenever rules need setting, Good and his coworkers must look at the bigger picture, not just the fish you love the most.
“When we do our surveys, we’re looking at the robustness, the quality of the fishery, the size structure, the abundance of fish in the water body,” he says. “We’re looking for certain metrics that indicate to us this is a pretty good fishery, whether it’s a certain number of fish over a minimum length or what we constitute to be a memorable size fish or even a trophy size fish. Once we look at a robust fishery and we say, okay, this lake has great habitats, great forage, water quality is really good, the fish are doing great, then we have to decide how many fish are reasonable to harvest for people who want to do that.”
But there is no magic formula. Every single body of water requires its own assessment. Angler input is critical, too, but sometimes it’s the hardest input to get.
No Lines Dropped
The fact of the matter is, fewer people harvest fish on a regular basis than they did 20, 30, or 40 years ago. According to Good, when anglers return surveys asking if they’d like to see limits higher, lower, or stay the same for species like walleye, lower is the most common answer these days. That’s if they send a survey back at all.
“We just released this website tool that we call an Angler Science Reporting Tool,” Good says. “We have six studies that are built into that where we have a species-focused management project. We’re trying to get direct data from anglers that are actually using that fishery. We have signs all over the place at all the access points, we put it out on social media. And we’re just not getting anything. Yet people will come up to you and complain that the trout fishing here is crap and ask what we’re going to do about it. But when I say ‘Hey, do you know about the citizen science? Did you see all the signs? Did you scan the QR code?’ They didn’t.”
The point is, we anglers have a lot of say in regulations, but if we ignore outlets for input given to us by officials, then we have less room to complain.
Most interesting, however, might be that, in many cases, regulations are purely a formality. Per Good, if you have a body of water that is truly healthy with a sustaining fish population, you could essentially make size and bag limits unlimited, and it wouldn’t hurt the populations at all. Why? Because biologists understand that these days it would be such a small number of people abusing the lax rules that it would be unlikely to alter a truly healthy fishery. Largemouth bass on Lake Champlain are the perfect example to illustrate how that breaks down.
The current limit is five per day, and Good has heard from his share of diehard bass fishermen that think it should be zero per day. But through years of study and survey, what Good knows is that the amount of people who actually take five bass per day is so small that the limit could be double that per day and it won’t hurt the population at all. Once again, it’s a matter of managing people; Five should satiate the rare folks looking for a limit of bass but be stomach-able for anglers who believe no bass should ever be killed. In the event truly drastic changes need to be made to regulations — the kind that anger fishermen most often — Good says that’s only in hopes of improving a fishery.
“Every move we make,” he says, “is to help you catch more and bigger fish, either in the short term or the long run.”
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