Does fishing reduce fish populations?
This may sound like a silly question at first, but it’s crucial to the survival of the brook trout. Often, fishing has meant taking the “keeper-size” fish home to fry or mount on the wall. But to more and more people now, fishing is just catching—testing one’s skill at selecting the right lure and casting into just the right spot to attract a fish—and then releasing the fish. While we might assume that a population doesn’t decline as a result of legal fishing, few studies had been conducted to see if, in fact, fishing and harvest harmed the sensitive fish that scientists wanted to protect. To see if fishing harmed the brook trout, fisheries biologists at Great Smoky Mountains National Park opened eight streams (four in Tennessee, and four in North Carolina) to fishing and harvest for three years. People fishing there of course had to comply with NPS fishing regulations (5 fish creel limit, 7-inch size limit, single hook artificial lures). In addition to opening the eight streams to fis
