All of the public lakes I mentioned in Tennessee that I personally witnessed the overharvest of, are very fertile, specifically because TWRA fertilizes them multiple times each year. The world record bluegill was caught from Alabama sixty-three years ago, but no bluegill even approaching that size has been caught from the state in many years. Back when I was in high school in the early eighties I read an article in one of the major fishing magazines in which a biologist for the state of Alabama named several of the top public waters in the state for bluegill; he stated that the bluegill averaged a pound each in Lamar County Public Fishing Lake. If you check the website for the Alabama DNR now, and go to the page for that same lake, they have a handful of photos of bluegill; one of them is a photo of a very excited angler, a grown man, holding up a bluegill as though it were a true trophy; the caption bears his name, and states he is holding a one-pound bluegill. The photo is from 2004, which implies that is one of the larger bluegill caught from the lake in the past ten years. So in twenty years, the lake went from having bluegill that average a pound each, to a population in which a one-pounder is rare.

Who knows but the world record would have been broken again by now if it were not for overharvest.

As to the contention that “most scientific facts are eventually proven to be false,” I think that takes the cake for the weakest single claim that has been made in this entire conversation. I think you have confused yahoo news articles on diet fads with actual science. I am by no means one who buys everything science says; for instance, I don’t believe humans evolved from primates. But to suggest that most science is false holds about as much water as asserting that the earth really is flat. If that were true, everyone who contracted cancer would die; there would be no such thing as nuclear weapons, or for that matter electricity, or engines, or airplanes, or modern medicine, or herbicides, or agriculture…Granted, some of the participants in this thread pretend as though science did not exist, or were not relevant to the lakes they fish.