WHY?

[MrTwisters]

[MrTwisters]

[MrTwisters]

[MrTwisters]

[MrTwisters]

[MrTwisters]

[vonreed]

LOL,  Looks likes there's gonna be a whole lot of good eating there.  More power to them if they're all legally taken.  I'm sure they taste as good as if they were caught with a fishing pole.  Thanks for sharing.

[MrTwisters]

Trophy fish are rare, taking them out eliminated the good genes that makes bigger fish,

eating smaller fish is fine,

however just cause you can harvest don't make it cool...

TNT harvest too? poison? where do we draw the line?

Meat fisherman have crushed many a good fishing spot just saying

[jdmidwest]

I think the whole concept of fishing revolved around gathering them as food.

[Al Agnew]

 

I think the whole concept of fishing revolved around gathering them as food.

That is true.  But like a lot of things, what was sometimes not too damaging when there were far fewer people around with far less technology is now extremely damaging with a lot more people with a lot better technology.  And even back in the days of yore, people often decimated the resource by too much harvest.  When "fishing" was a subsistence activity, the point was to get as much meat as you could use as efficiently as possible given your situation and equipment.  But fishing evolved a long time ago into a pleasurable activity to be done in your "leisure" time, and the whole catch and release ethic has been pretty popular now for 50-60 years.  Things change.  

And sometimes they don't change fast enough.  Fact is that, by almost any measure, a big adult game fish swimming in the body of water is a heck of a lot more valuable than it is on the end of a spear or gig.  Those are the fish that, more than the rest of the population, fuel a multi-billion dollar fishing tackle industry and huge state and local tourism industries.  Yet time and time again, the powers that be still look upon maximizing "harvest" of fish as the end goal of management.  There are valid reasons for harvesting some fish and eating them, and I believe we really should stick close to the roots of angling sometimes and eat some of the fish we catch.  But there is seldom a good reason for harvesting the largest members of the population.  They don't taste as good, and they are a big reason why people use sporting methods to fish.  Again...once they are killed, their value is lost.  If we wish to maximize the QUALITY of the fishery, we MUST protect the "trophies".  And methods such as spearfishing and gigging can specifically target the biggest ones, unlike hook and line angling, so they are going directly against maximizing the quality of the fishery.

Plus...in my opinion, grip and grin photos of fish you've just speared are kinda stupid...it's not like it took great skill to do it.