Quote Originally Posted by Amartinbio View Post
I'm not familiar with the situation on the white river, but those kinds of regulations are sometimes very appropriate and not extremely difficult to enforce. Managers have tried all kinds of regulations : spawning season closures, spawning area sanctuaries, pole limits, hook limits, etc. States generally try to use statewide regulations because they are easier for the public to interpret. But special regs are extremely useful in many situations. For example, our 10 inch limit is very useful in our big lakes, but would be a poor choice for a statewide reg. Too many lakes are over populated and have poor growth.

Different regs for different arms of rivers or different embayments are typically easier to enforce if access sites are limited. For example, if the ramp at Jonathan creek was the only ramp within 10 river miles a special reg would be easier to enforce than if there were a dozen ramps within 10 river miles.

Obviously one of the things managers evaluate when designing a reg is whether the reg can be easily enforced.

You're definitely right about getting what you pay for. We are funded by license sales and try to do whatever we can to stretch those dollars.
Since you took the time to reply I will push my luck and ask how could it be that a thirty acre lake can produce better Crappie fishing than a large reservoir? Now I think I know part of the answer from what I have already learned here from the biologists. The little lake has lots of vegetation, plenty of insects, virtually no fishing pressure, Black Crappie, lots of large bass to eat the little Crappie, no sewer systems up stream, no boats thus no erosion, most fishing is catch and release, no flood control up and downs in water level, surrounded by grass so no pesticides, and plenty of money to keep things the way they are. I'm not doing this conversation to be a pain it is simply the kind of complex problem I find interesting.