Quinte Fishing

Quest and first time poster. Good thread, glad we are getting along.

In regards of fish stocks nature takes pretty good care of itself. Two main factors for a healthy stock is food, in this case bait fish, and a successful spawn.

I believe there is enough fish in the water to feed any population. Taking fish out is good and not good depending on a giving time. When there is not enough bait, stocks will naturally go down, when there is lots of bait, stocks go up, when you take fish out you are making room for others.
But since we life in a commercialized society with a lot of greed its very hard for nature to keep at par. Of course it is better to release a big female hoping to help the stock and it will, the changes are higher, but its not the only factor for a healthy stock

Years ago when the Portuguese and the English fished cod on our east coast they could as the story goes ‘walk over the fish’. They did this for years with no problem to the stocks, even though there were years of plenty and years of a poor fishery. But over all stocks remained. Later on a fishery was opened for squid and shrimp the prime source of food for the cod. You see what I’m getting at, we are taking all, till slowly on our fishery went dead. Also the seal hunt was stopped so more seals eating what ever is left of the cod. If we would have left the squid and the shrimp there would still be a ‘harvest of plenty’ on our Canadian east coast. At the moment cod fishing is pretty well band. Now what happen is with no cod and red fish around the shrimp are doing good with nothing hunting them down. Lots of shrimp around now a days. ‘Our solution,’ Gov’t has increased the quota’s, plenty of foreign boats to catch the most valuable food source for the cod of which they are still hoping will return. Not so, because with not enough food to go around cod can’t life. If they don’t leave the food source there cod will not return. You see what I mean. Its more important to have lots of bait fish in the lake than to take a fish out.

The big issue is environmental. You want to help with the stocks. Stop using bleach, don’t spay your lawn, tell the farmer to stop using pesticides, acid rain, our no respect for nature etc, and the list goes on and on, we are killing all little micro animals for spawn to live of and start a life cycle. Look at the salmon in our creeks, no problem years ago, now every river has to be restocked. You don’t imagine the damage salt, fertilizer, medicine and all other chemicals that our society dumps into the environment does. A heck of a lot more than a few fish taken. Its not just the walleye or perch that are suffering, but also our bait fish stocks.

One more thing. Years ago fish was caught, now we are raping the seas. Salmon on the west was plenty till ‘we’ raped the salmon 300 miles from shore. Our solutions is to start farming the salmon, but what we don’t know is that 9 lbs of other fish has to be caught to make feed to grow one lb of salmon. This ‘other fish’ is a food source of other fish and so on, till.......or what is happening......you get what happen to our cod fishery.

I know I have drifted away from the walleye issue, but before we point fingers, lets look at the fishery in a whole. Nature has its own natural cycle, good years and bad. One good spawn can put billions and billions of walleye into the lake. We as a whole society are not helping it survive.