Thread: Bluegill Conservation

This makes sense, here I asked the biologists if too many years (70+) of heavy pressure on Crappie on Nimrod Lake had caused size to decline and they did not think so. If the biggest and best removed it looks like the culls could be free to take over . IMO

I agree 100%, Nimrod.

I really don't have an opinion either way about keeping a limit or not and haven't given much thought about the preservation part of it. Certainly turning back the BIG ONES, except for an occasional mount, has to improve the gene pool. As far as filling a freezer I've never done that. I'm lucky enough to live in an area that you can catch fish anytime you wish. So, if I want fish for dinner...I go fishing! There's something biting all the time and then I only keep 5 maybe 6. Who wants to thaw out fish when you can get in a fishing trip and a fresh supper at the same time.

Originally Posted by Speckanator

So, if I want fish for dinner...I go fishing! There's something biting all the time and then I only keep 5 maybe 6. Who wants to thaw out fish when you can get in a fishing trip and a fresh supper at the same time.

Dave Genz, a well-known ice fisherman, made the same argument. He said he never freezes fish.

Speckanator, diddnt you just post this the other day about your fishing log?


My fishing log from last year: First number caught.... second number kept....third number water temp

Wednesday, September 12, 2012 Monroe 14 9 81 s stone island
Thursday, September 13, 2012 Monroe 13 7 81 s stone island
Friday, September 14, 2012 Monroe 13 6 81 s stone island and west
Sunday, September 16, 2012 Monroe 5 5 81 s west markers OPP
Monday, September 17, 2012 Monroe 22 14 81 s mother'sarm
Thursday, September 20, 2012 Monroe 38 37 ? p phantom309 mother's arm 2 to 5 mph wind
Tuesday, September 25, 2012 Monroe 35 18 79 s west shore markers Russ fishing
Wednesday, September 26, 2012 Monroe 40 25 79 s Stone Island North shore line russ and danny fishing
Saturday, September 29, 2012 Monroe 35 20 p dad stone island north shore


Not that I care you are keeping fish, I do the same but you also fall into the "meathead" category by the standards of this panfish forum, with 141 crappie kept in less than a month......thats less than my 2 bream trips which totaled less than 130 fish kept, and probably my last bream trip of the year as i am having foot surgery in a week and wont be able to fish for 90-120 days (this should make TNpondmanager happy) I am sure you had someone with you and you shared the fish.........same as I do. I had 2 other people with me the first day that I kept around 60, we each took home 20. And my second trip I had 2 other folks as well, I think you know them, Jeff and Dawn Brown. All of these fish were supposed to be put in their pond but my aerator battery died and we had to keep them for table fair instead. Keeping frozen bream is like keepig deer meat, spring is bream season, fall is deer season. You kill enough deer to last you the year, you catch enough bream to last you the year, its the same thing. I dont fish for gills in the fall, winter, or spring. Summer is when I fish for them and until the day I die I will continue to keep bream to fry when I desire, regardless of what anyone on here thinks.

On another note its silly to say that only the BIG fish have good genetics and can carry on the stock. With this type thinking you would have to believe that the BIG fish never spawn and produce offspring. You think they are the only BIG fish in the history of the fishery and that they were just magically put in the fishery without having to be grown? Now I believe in magic but thats just taking it a little too far. Just like Nimrod said above, take out the Big ones and the culls can grow. I really dont understand how TNpondmanager agreed with this when he jumped on me for keeping mature gills but I have seen stranger things. But, there will always be big bluegill in the St. Johns river system, you cant catch all the BIG ones anyway. Its not like a little 500 acre lake. The system is over 300 miles long with over 8,000 square miles to fish. Even the local newspaper fishing reports said guides have said this year was one of the best years for bream fishing ever recorded even after years and years of out of state and local fisherman have been keeping fish from the system

I spoke with FWC and asked the biologist for the area to come on here and post data and the status of the norther St. Johns river system which I fish. BTW, this is the LEAST pressured area of the entire river. More people croaker and redfish fish than they do bream fish. I see the biologist diddnt come on here and post so i will have to call him back in a few days if I havnt heard from him. I would tell yall what he said but I would rather it come from the horses mouth who has actual local fish shock results, spawning data, etc.

I am not calling you out Speckanator just showing that keeping 120-130 fish over 2 trips to last basically an antire year is no diff than spanning it out over a month, its the same thing, the same amount or more fish are being taken out of the fishery and people are OK with it. Tree huggers just seem to look at thing in their own little box and think what they think is ok. You will never see me beat up on people for doing something that is lawful. That is their right as a tax paying citizen. I feel strongly about politics as well and do not like when bills and laws try to get passed that directly conflict with the constitution. I joined the military because I love our country and wanted to say that I served when its time for me to pack it up in the end. Yall (not calling out anybody directly) can get on here and rant all you want about a nice mess of fish being posted but all its gonna do is cause arguements, discourage potential members that have also caught a nice mess from posting, or make it where someone gets so discouraged that they wont even post at all anymore because they dont want to deal with all the tree hugger comments.

Nimrod did not say he keeps large crappie - he said that he had asked a state biologist if the people keeping the big crappie were hurting the gene pool by doing so, by allowing the fish with lesser genetics to take over. And when to say that all fish have the same genetics, is to reveal the depth of one's ignorance regarding fish - that's akin to saying that every human can grow the same height as Kareem Abdul Jabbar, or run as fast as Usain Bolt. The difference between more and less desirable traits among a given species is a cornerstone of modern agriculture, not to mention aquaculture, so it's just laughable to argue that all fish have the same genetic potential to grow large. Some people really will say anything to defend their greediness on the water, because they know deep down they are wrong.

So it's legal, as of the moment, for a person to keep fifty bluegill in a day's fishing. Not too long ago in this country it was legal to smoke in any public place in the country - did that make it any less carcinogenic to the non-smokers? Did the law make it any less wildly inconsiderate, and completely disregarding of another human being, to smoke in a non-smoker's face, just because you legally could? Fifty years ago it was legal in many parts of the country for restaurants to refuse service to someone based on the color of his skin - I suppose that made it right? I have a strong suspicion one of the participants in this thread probably smokes in non-smokers' faces on a regular basis and thinks nothing of it. Because of course that's what the Constitution was referring to in the Bill of Rights - it even has a sub-clause guaranteeing the right to give others cancer if it makes you get a buzz.

I'm not a tree hugger - as I already said (but it was ignored because some people will say anything, including distorting the truth, to try to defend their indefensible stance), I am as far from liberal as a person can get. I try to live by Mark 12: 30, one of the two commandments Jesus gave us: "Love your neighbor as yourself." He didn't say, "Unless you don't feel like it, or it cramps your style, or you want to load up your freezer even if it destroys your neighbor's fishing."

Lake Perris is nearly two thousand acres. An even better example is Lake Okeechobee, an example I've given several times but which was conveniently ignored because it proves I'm right. I'd love to hear an explanation of how the bluegill averaging seven to eight inches now in Lake Okeechobee, even though the largemouth are by the accounts of many guides doing fantastic and as big as ever, has nothing to do with overharvest. The limit on largemouth is five, with a protected slot - but of course that has nothing at all to do with why they're doing so much better in the lake than the bluegill are. The hurricane and the weeds that diminished but are now prominent again just happened not to hurt the largemouth but have decimated the bluegill size, even though they both use the same habitat.

Even if one needed the number of fish some people in this thread keep annually to survive, there's still no excuse whatsoever to keep the largest fish. A half-pound bluegill eats just as well as an eleven incher, with the major difference that keeping a half-pounder from a system where there are bigger fish, does not hurt the genetics like keeping the bigger fish does. I realize the meathog in this thread didn't bother to read the article I linked to that relates how Illinois biologists have discovered that removing the largest males from a bluegill population permanently weakens the genetic potential of that population; or maybe he conveniently just chose to deny the truth of what is now accepted as fact by scientists who study bluegill. He's a big believer in biologists when it comes to the ones who allow him to pillage the resource, but any biologist who disagrees with him doesn't know what he's talking about, or his research only applies to other waters.

To all the sane, considerate anglers reading this thread: if enough of us contact our various state DNRs and demand that they bring their regulations on bluegill into the current century, it will happen. Most DNRs now have regulations on largemouth that take into account the body of knowledge we have now on that species, because largemouth are the most popular fish in the country and the biologists couldn't get away with disregarding them. But biologists in many states at present pretend that bluegill are not important enough to anglers to bother with careful management of. I actually had a TWRA guy say to me, when I proposed stricter limits for a local lake that was just beginning to have a trophy bluegill fishery, that they would have to do an angler survey over the course of a year to determine if anyone was fishing for bluegill. And two months later it was irrelevant because all of the anglers who weren't fishing for bluegill had wiped out all the big ones in that lake.

And this is really the bigger issue. It's not just that one trophy bluegill fishery is at stake, the one that we're assured can never be fished out; it's the fact that every time a photo of fifty big male bluegill is posted on a forum like this, another meathog is encouraged to go out and do likewise on his own local hotspot in Virginia or Tennessee or Arkansas or wherever. It's exactly this mindset that has led to most of the best public bluegill fisheries in the country being overharvested to the point that their fishing is a shadow of what it once was.

But I suppose some people won't believe it until every last public waterway is depleted. Then they'll give the rest of us a carefree grin, tell us that's just life, and go fish for bass. Because after all, it was perfectly legal.

Here's a link to an article that mentions Dave Genz - this is one of my favorite articles about big bluegill. Several times throughout the article, overharvest is mentioned as the reason why most public waters no longer have the large bluegill they once did. They quote a biologist for the state of Minnesota, Pete Jacobson, who says this about the subject: "Most lakes in Minnesota, except the northeastern corner, present excellent growing and breeding conditions," says Jacobson. "There’s no magic combination of factors that produces big bluegills. Truthfully, most lakes would hold sizable bluegills if angler harvests were reduced."


But of course it isn't relevant because he's not in Florida.

Im tapping out, there is no point in trying to talk to the bully of this forum. I am sorry for the other anglers of the St. Johns river system as I have destroyed any chance they have in the future of catching big gills. I wasnt aware that keepin 3 limits of fish between 5 or 6 people would have such a negative effect on the fishery. It will probably be years before the fishery recovers..............I wish I could put the guts back in the fish, reattach the heads, and put the scales back on the fish, perform fish CPR and release them back to the one bed, in the one little cove, of the massive 8000 square mile fishery. I thought that since fish have been caught like this for decades that i would be ok to keep the ones we did. I now know that from the extensive stuides done in the northern states that I have doomed the existense of future big bluegill. Lord have mercy on me. I would also like to call out the thousands of bait and sporting good stores who have made a living in FL relying on people to come and purchase bait, rods, line, reels, and various other fishing items as they are also directly contributing to the destruction of the FL bluegill as we know it. These people should be ashamed of themselves, and thrown out of thier homes and be left jobless in this great economy we have. It doesnt matter if decade after decade the bream fishing has been supurb, it is all coming to an end. Lord have mercy on all of our souls.........please forgive me