SpoonDog

Man. I started watching that video and had to quit a couple seconds in- that platform. All that removed bankside vegetation. The bare earth. The digging and fill dirt and log installation, and not a silt fence in sight. A twenty, fifty pound fish thrashing in a few inches of water right next to shore. I wonder how much bank erosion is caused by carp anglers and their quarry?

We've had this discussion before Wrench, and you still don't seem to grasp that your feelings are worth precisely as much as everyone else's. But just for funsies, let's say we convinced the state fish and game agency to pull the plug on walleye and paddlefish- two species that wouldn't persist without stocking. The state agency in charge of protecting fish and wildlife has now taken the position that it's alright to allow populations of native sportfish species to decline, even disappear, within large portions of their native range. You've just eliminated any justification for restrictive smallmouth regs. If zero's an acceptable population size for walleye, and an acceptable population size for paddlefish, it's an acceptable population size for smallies. No need for creel limits, for size limits, no reason to manage otters or giggers. We've set a precedent that sportfish will be fine, even if they're no longer present. MDC isn't perfect, but they're legally obligated to protect fish, forests and game. Eliminating that obligation doesn't strengthen it.

Look at a distribution map of rainbow trout in Missouri. Look at a distribution map of brown trout in Missouri. Look at a distribution map of common carp in Missouri. One of these things is not like the other. I'll let you tell me which one it is.

Only if you don't fish for walleye, you don't fish for paddlefish, you have no interest in elk, if you dont read the magazine, and if you don't stroke out in the back end of a conservation area where the only guy around is in a little Jeep Liberty- and he can't get to you. It's real easy to say MDC should cut the programs we don't like to pay for the programs we do like. I think it's deeply, profoundly stupid that MDC spends ANY amount of money on quail- when every Dick and John in the county plants corn and soybeans from one fencerow to the next, when they spray said field with enough Roundup to make certain there's nothing alive for quail to eat, slapping a bumper sticker and heading to the Quail Forever meeting to lament the bird's plight and share how, in the olden days, they used to go out every day of the season and shoot a limit, or pert near. I don't know how many times I've heard a line to that effect, spoken sincerely, as though it's never dawned on them the relationship between killing every quail you see and then having none left. It's the only thing anyone's ever said that made me understand why passenger pigeons and Carolina parakeets are no longer around. There's probably some dude up near Kirksville who loves catfish and crappie but has never seen a live smallmouth, never fished for smallmouth, no interest in smallmouth, thinks spending any money on smallmouth is stupid and a waste of money. It doesn't matter, because it isn't an a la' carte menu. I pay taxes for schools I'll never attend and for roads I'll never drive on, it's part of basic citizenship. There's nothing unreasonable about paying conservation sales taxes, even if it means funding projects you receive no direct benefit from. If you've driven many roads in the state I know you know they're not outstanding. Education's middle of the road. Missouri isn't at the top of most lists when it comes to government services...under no circumstances should we be looking to most of them as a model of government efficiency or constituent services. The author of the article isn't discriminating between cost and value. Other state agencies are good because they're cheap- even it means someone can't access healthcare. MDC's bad because they're expensive- they purchased 50 properties for me to hunt and fish on, when they said they'd only buy five. It's that convoluted, bean counter-y logic that's got us among the worst roads in the country, mediocre education, etc. You get what you pay for. The priorities don't change with less money, you just have less money. Eliminating that much of MDC's budget doesn't reshuffle the priorities, it means the low priorities get cut. And MDC can very easily do less for smallmouth management in the state. Even if management biologists wanted to redo a study or revisit regs, they couldn't- Missouri's smallmouth anglers would have taken that option off the table. The next big political fight and MDC's not going to rock the legislator's boat when it comes to gravel mining or stream access, leaving anglers to struggle with a legislature heavily influenced by ag and private property rights. It's easy to get mad, to stomp your feet, to cut off your nose to spite your face. But it may have unintended consequences.

...$35 for a basic membership, $80 for a special membership, $75 for a hoodie AND you guys STILL have fundraisers?! You'd think with that kinda dough there'd be more in the way of....you know. Results.

...so even the Carp Society of America guys aren't buying the $75 green hoodie?

...hoodies and stickers should be the brown M&Ms of conservation organizations.

Oh no, I completely understand the conservation value groups like DU and others have, generally. I'm curious what conservation value the American Carp association has. I guess I should've been more specific. THEIR hoodie is in color AND it's only $25! AND unlike those uppity well-heeled carp guys, they sell coozies!

That's excellent, MOCarp! I'm glad Carp Society of America is willing to purchase private lakes and open them up to the general public for free. I look forward to seeing how much research they've funded, how many watersheds and lakes they've purchased, and how many regs they've helped put on the books in the upcoming annual report. There's an annual report, right? Hopefully they'll finally be able to get punt-gunning for common carp banned, honestly I didn't even know it was an issue.

Do the lawyers get a discount on the hoodie? ...but seriously. What happens to the money?

But seriously, I'm glad to have another Carp Society of America member on board. Perhaps now we can get to addressing some of my burning questions. Let's talk about these hoodies. What's the hoodie material? 100% cotton? Polyester blend? Double-stitched? Do they run true to size? Does it qualify as "tactical wear?" Is the shade of green based on the number of rod and cone cells in a carp's eye, so that the wearer is rendered practically invisible? Are they machine washable? I hope so, there's gonna be a lot of mucus and blood and ground-in dough bait. In fact, maybe it'd be wiser to sell a poncho or, better yet, a full-body condom for the serious carp angler. It'll reduce the mess on your clothes AND prevent contaminating bits and gear with human scent! Just cut me in on 10% of the profits and the idea's all yours. And where does the $35 in dues go? TU puts out a magazine, does the trout in the classroom program, assists with habitat restoration on streams, funds research, assists with purchasing and developing access to streams, and lobbies congress. What's the TU of carp fishing do?

Perhaps it's time to soak yer doughballs in the paylake of life, MOCarp. See what nibbles.

I don't understand why it matters. I can't control who gets a flu vaccine- doesn't mean I shouldn't get a flu vaccine. I can't control what's on a duck's butt, but I can control what's in or on my boat, motor, trailer, fishing gear, wading boots, etc. Knowing waterfowl can transport critters is a neat bit of trivia, but unless you're going to diaper every duck, goose and coot on the continent, it has pretty limited management implications. There's nothing you can really do about it.

PLUS! It means the turtles don't have to work so hard. I can't imagine having to tread water while eating, it sounds exhausting.

I saw the folding pocket knife and thought it'd be ideal for puncturing air bladders.

Almost as though anyone can send a press release to a news station and they'll put it up on their website. Oh it's definitely not poor people- $75 bucks for a hoodie AFTER you pay $35 in dues, AND the hoodie doesn't even come with carp-leather reinforced elbows!

I think it'd be cooler if he threaded the fly line through his gauges and used them as an extra-sensitive bite indicator and landed two 20# at the same time, with a rod in his hand. That'd be awesome. Is it correct terminology to refer to a carp inhaling a fly or a HNV boilie as a "bite" when they're rooting it off the bottom? Is it more accurate to say carp suck?

Is there a list of named fish kept somewhere? Do they publish a "Who's Who of American Carp" with all the fish mugshots? If I wanted to make some sort of life list, traveling the country chronicling my adventures at catching the country's most famous carp, that'd be pretty important. Will there be opportunities for Carp of the Month calendars, or am I thinking too far ahead? I found this neat article on fish leather. Some of them even use carp! What's the American' Carp Society's position on turning one's trophy into a commemorative wallet or a lampshade? What sort of microfishing opportunities are available among the burgeoning American carp-fishing community?

Sorta my thought....at what point do common carp become so popular they no longer require the constant stream of threads? I'd buy a hat, a shirt, or a bumper sticker to further that goal But more importantly: who gets to name the fish? The ones that are caught over and over by multiple anglers. The first person to catch it? The first person to catch it at some memorable size? Is there some international convention on the naming of trophy carp? Do they get tattoos or ear tags, like cattle, to make sure there's no confusion?

My grandpa built the Back Pond in the late 1960s and for the longest time it never held water the way it should- he ran pigs through it, ran cows through it, all in an effort to stir up enough clay to seal it up. He wound up throwing a couple carp in there a week or two before the moon landing in 1969, figuring they'd root up enough mud to finally seal the thing. My dad snagged one of them on a little cleo when I was maybe nine or ten. I started calling them Al and Buzz because I figured Neil got the most attention and mistakenly thought Shepard was on Apollo 11. I caught one once, as a teenager, and I never fished for them again although I still see them as dark spots in the pond or rooting around willows and water marigold rooting up bugs or looking to spawn. I just watch them now. You don't stab pets.

They are? Because the information you provided us says they're not: The Department of Natural Resources says there’s no direct link between bowfishing and low numbers of carp in Grand Traverse Bay. Scott Heintzleman – a fisheries biologist for the DNR – says a lot of environmental factors like rising water levels could make the carp go to new areas. It came from here, which is the link you provided us. Why? Thirty hours ago you were convinced the only think we need is the word of a couple carp guides, so what's changed? If our question is "do bowfishers cause declines in carp populations?" then how many fish each person shot doesn't matter. How big each one was doesn't matter. How old the biggest one was doesn't matter. What any of them were eating doesn't matter. All that matters is how many you're killing each year, and whether that number is going up or down. Practically all of that information can be collected from a dumpster full of dead fish, so it isn't that hard. But that isn't the point: you're spending time and resources collecting information which has no bearing on the question. If you think this information is critically important to answering your questions, then we also need to be measuring every fish caught by carp guides, weighing each fish captured, extracting an otolith from each carp they catch, ,and conducting random stomach sampling. That way they're directly comparable, and there's no bias. Write it up, get it funded, and I'll endorse it 100%. Me! I don't! If it's gonna wreck the ecosystem, I don't want to catch more and bigger fish! I'm sure there's folks who'd like more and bigger hogs, more and bigger pythons in the Everglades, but they share a planet with seven billion other folks who shouldn't have to sacrifice environmental quality so some subset can get their f'in rocks off. If common carp were some native species maligned unnecessarily and being pushed towards decline, I'd be the first to leap to their cause. They're not, and I have no interest in pretending they are. There's just too many native species with really restricted ranges and really serious conservation concerns for me to make believe a species which occurs (invasively) on every continent save Antarctica is in desperate need of my attention. Carp in eastern Europe might be imperiled- they can worry about that in eastern Europe. It isn't my problem. No one sheds a tear because a billion zebra mussels are scraped from boat hulls and power plants a day. Three-hundred sixty six thousand pounds of lake trout were removed from Yellowstone this year; maybe some argue they're a trophy opportunity but that has to be weighed against the cost. Yeah, yeah, carp have been around 140 years- that just means there's no 170 year old fishermen around to tell us what things were like way back when. There's no frame of reference. Nothing to compare post-carp with. It's as silly as arguing Chestnut Blight isn't an issue because no one can remember what forests used to look like. Money isn't unlimited. Resources aren't unlimited. You yourself identify those limitations. Not even a century ago everything- not just common carp- was completely unregulated. Fished, gigged, netted, shocked with phone boxes, dynamited. People have been trying to get rid of these things for 140 years. They've been throwing them on the bank for 140 years. They're still around, they're still abundant, they still get big, they're still caught regularly. I'm supposed to pretend they're in imminent danger? Unless you're a six-foot tall walking, talking, typing mink, it isn't relevant. A sixty pound carp full of heavy metals, caught and released, eventually dies, rots, and releases those heavy metals back into the ecosystem. Or it's scavenged by catfish, mink, turtles, eagles...and it poisons the next generation. If you put that sixty pound carp in a dumpster and it goes to a landfill, those heavy metals or other pollutants aren't put back into the ecosystem when it dies and rots.

Carp bioaccumulate all sorts of nasty heavy metals- Cadmium, Lead, Chromium, and Nickel. PCB contaminated carp were fed to mink, resulting in impaired reproduction and survival of mink offspring. Common carp bioaccumulate PCBs in Lake Eerie, with the oldest adult males having the highest concentrations. Carp bioaccumulate Lead and Arsenic. Carp in the upper Mississippi River accumulate Scotch Guard, among other things. Carp accumulate flame retardants. Carp accumulate DDT Carp accumulate Mercury. Maybe the reason it's so tough to find things that'll eat carp does have something to do with nutrition after all. Maybe the best thing we could do for the systems where these guys are found is remove 300,000 lbs of them at a time.

There could be ten additional anglers for each one participating in the tourney, or ten thousand- it wouldn't matter. There could be an additional thousand anglers added year over year, and it wouldn't matter. If there are more fish being removed from the system than what's being recorded, you'd expect a stronger relationship, a more severe decline in pounds of fish harvested per year. The Texas folks said alligator gar were being overharvested because there's fewer of them now than there were previously. I hate to sound like a broken record- but you can't make that claim with carp, because the conclusion isn't drawn from the evidence. I trust you're a reasonable guy, MOCarp- that's why I'm sure you and I can agree that if you asked ten anglers "How's the fishing?" you may get a very different response than if you asked ten thousand. Nearly seven thousand teams- I'm assuming there's multiple people on a team- have participated in that tourney over the past thirty years. We're talking ten thousand people, easy. Yet the only evidence that matters is the testimony of a handful of carp fishing guides? Your position requires us to believe their opinion is worth a hundred times more than anyone else's. Ignoring the experience of all those other people means we're doing exactly what you don't think we should- dismissing people's anecdotal evidence. I'm not the one being disingenuous. You're not distinguishing between good information and bad information based on the quality of the information. You're distinguishing between good and bad information based on whether it supports or contradicts your preordained position. This is just the most recent example.

Cool. I guess if you had a better argument, you'd make it. Best of luck!

EXACTLY! the fact that a YOY bluegill and carp look very close to size and body shape...in digested form its difficult to know what the contents are.... there are ways, but it will take a more taxonomic approach to ID-ing whats eating all those baby carp/buffalo.....walked right into that one didn't you slappy? You made a decision to misrepresent what I said, to take my words out of context- and that speaks volumes. You're confusing dishonesty with a rational response. Good science requires a commitment to integrity you haven't demonstrated. It doesn't matter who funds the study if the underlying data is garbage. A garbage study doesn't become a great study just because you change the name on the check. The outcome hasn't changed, you've just found a different way of doing the same dumb, nonsensical, useless, worthless thing. I want to think really hard about what you're saying here...harder than anything you've thought about on this thread. Just focus all of your mental energy on what this says, and what this means. They've been doing this for thirty years. Sixteen of those thirty years, they've set the world record. Since 2000 they've been killing at minimum, around 40,000 lbs of carp annually. They're still killing a ton of carp. They're still killing as many carp as ever- and the number of anglers participating hasn't changed much. If bowfishermen are decimating carp populations, we should see them catching fewer carp through time. We don't. We don't see any relationship in carp catch through time, much less a negative one. We asked a question: Do bowfishers negatively impact carp populations? We collected data: number of carp killed by bowfishers in over a 30 year period We analyzed that data: looking for a relationship (trend) between the year, the number of carp anglers, and the pounds of carp harvested. We interpreted our results: Even with the number of anglers participating relatively constant, the pounds of carp harvested didn't show any relationship with year. They were killing more carp in 2016 than 2014, or 2013, or 2008, or 2005... We can then draw a conclusion, from our results: Bowfishing has less effect on carp populations than some other factor that we're not considering. Congratulations, MOCarp! We just did your study. We just answered your question- with data you helped provide. Granted it isn't Missouri- but neither is Texas or California or Minnesota or the northeast US, so we can quit pretending that's ever honestly been an issue for you. And that's a really noble goal. But there's a lot of folks out there advocating for carp as a sport fish, and they're doing it with integrity. They're arguing carp aren't going anywhere, that they're one of the few sportfish which can persist in highly modified human environments, that they're readily accessible to anglers in urban areas. They're not making up stories about how important carp are to trophy bass and they're not misrepresenting information to further their cause. They're taking carp and carp fishing for what it is, not what they may want it to be, and that's diametrically opposed to your approach. When you do what you do (and you do it consistently) it raises big, glaring questions about your credibility. When you've wrecked your own credibility, it makes folks less likely to buy the story you're trying to sell them. Maybe your approach is an impediment to your objective, instead of an asset.