If you catch a fish and you set it free, it could be just fine. Indeed, it could be rather fun for the fish. “Hey, did you see that? You wouldn’t believe what I just saw! Hey, you know that eagle that ate Joe last week? I could see where its nest was! And this guy had this whole bucket of leeches! Holy crayfish!”

But most likely, if you catch a fish intending to release it, there is a chance it will not fare so well. People who catch catfish intentionally know this, and don’t bother with catch and release. I’m not sure if I’ve ever caught a catfish where the hook didn’t go deep into its gut as the sole action in the entire process of grabbing the bait. Not even worth taking the hook out. You just take the catfish home, clean it, and get the hook then. Generally, live bait has a higher chance of this sort of thing happening. Unless you are jigging with a fairly large hook and a live bait that is hanging off, the chance of your fish swallowing the hook, even part way, is high. Generally, as well, fishing in this manner is associated with fishing for food or, one might hope once in ten lifetimes, a trophy walleye or something.

I personally fish almost exclusively with lures. If the lure comes with a treble hook, I’ll either remove it and replace it with a single hook, or cut off one or two hooks. I mush or cut off the barbs. I take at least one of the treble hooks off any lure with multiple trebles. For bait hooks, I smush or remove the barb. And so on.

(By the way, this give me the opportunity to put a single weedless hook on a lure that is essentially designed to catch on to every damn thing in the lake, allowing for more options when casting.)

When I catch the fish, since I’m casting and reeling and the hook is barbless, it is pretty easy to remove the hook from the fish. Sometimes, if the fish is fairly big, I don’t actually want to land it. That may involve too much handling, and that can damage the fish. With a single hook and no barb, I can get a look at the fish, and flick it free pretty easily about half the time.

(Also, I carry at least one very large needle nose pliers. I can grab the base of the hook or the hook/lure with that, and with a simple twist, release the fish before or after landing, depending.)

I’m pretty sure that I don’t do a lot of damage to the fish I fish for. If a fish I catch is legal and damaged, I eat it. (Not right there on the spot; I clean and cook it first.)

How might catch and release injure fish that are not particularly mangled by the process? There is a paper just out in the Journal of Experimental Biology, bu Melissa Thompson, Sam Wassenbergh, Sean Rogers, Scott Seamone, and Timothy Higham. In “Angling-induced injuries have a negative impact on suction feeding performance and hydrodynamics in marine shiner perch, Cymatogaster aggregata” the researchers report that injury to the inside of the fish’s mouth can change the pressure gradient that these fish use to suck prey (and lures) into themselves. It is not demonstrated that this impacts survival, but it does seem to impact feeding efficiency.

“The suction feeding system is somewhat similar to how we drink liquid through a straw,” Higham said. “If you poke a hole in the side of your straw it’s not going to work properly.”

Fish researcher Tim Higham explains, “As we predicted, the fish with the mouth injuries exhibited a reduction in the speed at which they were able to draw prey into their mouths. This was the case even though we used barbless hooks, which are less damaging than barbed hooks. Although we don’t yet know how/if this reduction in feeding performance would affect fitness and survivability in nature, we can say that fishing-induced injuries impact the fish’s ability to feed while the mouth is healing. This study emphasizes that catch-and-release is not as simple as removing the hook and all being well, but rather is a complex process that should be studied in more detail.”

This is obviously going to depend on the kind of fish in question. As noted above, the whole suck-in-the-food approach for catfish may simply do them in. But I’m not sure a Northern or Muskie is feeding in exactly the same way. Clearly, more research is needed!

The abstract of the paper:

Fishing is a popular and lucrative sport around the world and, in some cases, may contribute to declining fish stocks. To mediate this problem and maintain fish biomass in aquatic ecosystems, catch-and-release fishing, whereby a fish is caught and immediately released, has been implemented in many countries. It is unclear whether the injuries to the mouth that are caused by the hook have an impact on feeding performance of fishes. Using high-speed video and computational fluid dynamics (CFD), we asked whether injuries around the mouth caused by fishing hooks have a negative impact on suction feeding performance (measured as maximum prey velocity) of the commonly angled marine shiner perch (Cymatogaster aggregata). We hypothesized that fish with mouth injuries would exhibit decreased feeding performance compared with controls. Ten shiner perch were caught using scientific angling and 10 were caught using a seine net. Feeding events were then recorded at 500 frames per second using a high-speed camera. Compared with the control group, maximum prey velocity was significantly lower in the injured group (P<0.01). Maximum gape, time to peak gape, maximum jaw protrusion and predator–prey distance were comparable between the control and injured groups, leading us to conclude that the injury-induced hole in the buccal cavity wall reduced the pressure gradient during mouth expansion, thereby reducing the velocity of water entering the fish's mouth. This was confirmed with our CFD modelling. Fishing injuries in nature are likely to depress feeding performance of fish after they have been released, although it is currently unclear whether this has a significant impact on survival.

A No-Wake Rule means the oversized fishing boats and smallish cabin cruisers that normally ply this large exurban lake need to all go at 5 m.p.h. or less, and forget about wake boarding, water skiing, and all those other fast, wake churning activities. The result? A lot of butt hurt, a near First World depression setting in in the Twin Cities wester suburbs. Somebody took away our boy toys!

But then, somebody went fishing. It isn’t a great fishing lake. It is mainly a go-fast lake. In fact, it is on this particular lake, I believe (with no evidence I quickly add) the method of fast-trolling for muskies was invented. This is a way to “go fishing” and go fast at the same time. You drag the lure behind you as fast as your boat will go. It is said you can catch muskies this way. To my knowledge it has never happened. Just more boy toy.

Anyway, somebody went fishing on the No Wake Lake, and guess what happened? They caught a boat load of fish! Literally! Then their friends went out fishing, and they caught a boat load of fish too! Pretty soon all the fisherpersons who had access discovered that when you don’t drive giant boats back and froth across the lake at high speed all day, the fish feed. When you do, they hunker down, feed infrequently, and grow slowly.

Now, I’m not going to vouch for this relationship just yet, but it makes intuitive sense. In my own experience, quiet places are where you catch fish. If I’m fishing up at the lake, once the boats start driving around skiing (say on a fourth of july weekend) I might as well reel it in and go get a beer, because that’s the end of the fishing. I’m pretty sure my best fishing has been on Wednesday and Thursday, before the startup of the loud and noisy weekend. And that’s on a quietish part of a relatively quiet lake.

The only reason I’m mentioning this now is because I came across this story from my Science News Roundup:

The blare of human noise causes birds to pipe down and frogs to breed less frequently. Now, scientists have found a humanmade sound that has a far more colorful effect: The boom of a ship’s engine makes common cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) change the complex swirls of skin hues, stripes, and spots that they use for camouflage and communication. …when researchers placed a loudspeaker near cuttlefish tanks and played the sound of an underwater engine, the animals swam more and changed colors more often. They also raised their first pair of arms, which are used to sense water movements, more frequently…The sounds of crashing surf had no effect, providing the first evidence that engine noise may stress the animals out.

The original story is here, in American Naturalist.

I would love to see a large number of large lakes shut down for boating. No motors. Eventually, of course, there will be no gas powered motors, with the shut down of fossil fuels. I promise you, when we start using quiet electric boats for fishing, the fishing will get better.

Just so you know, he was not fishing for “bluegills” This is a bluegill:

Bluegills live in fresh water and are like “sunfish” and “pumpkinseeds” and “crappies” etc. all of which are in the bass family.

Bluefish live in the ocean and roam along littoral regions in large schools. This is what large bluefish look like:

Of course, when one is fishing for bluefish, there is always the possibility of catching the fish that eats them, such as striped bass. Like this:

The striped bass is not in the “bass family” referred to above. Striped Bass are Moronidae, bluegills, largemouth bass, etc. are Centrarchidae.

Anyway, sometimes you catch a shark.

Cooperative Extension Agent:

Of course, it never really gets unbearably hot here. Again, I can make the comparison: A heat wave where I grew up is when the temperature hits 100 or more during the hottest hour of the afternoon and the nights do not cool off much. Here, where I live now, a heat wave is where it hits 90 or more every day but it will still go to 70 or sometimes below during the coolest part of the night. People in Chicago and New York will complain about their heat wave to about the same degree as people in central and northern Minnesota will complain about their heat wave, but there is a difference. People in Chicago and New York die during their heat waves. Not all of them, but some of them.

Heat Wave:

Of course, people in northern Minnesota die by falling through the ice more often than people in New York or Chicago do.

Typical Day On the Ice:

My feet can be wet, and even muddy and sandy inside my shoes and I don’t care. Glynn Isaac could not stand wet feet. He grew up in arid country (South Africa and Kenya) while I grew up spending time in a temperate moist forest (the Adirondacks). Had this not been true, I would have never done my PhD on what I did it on. Glynn wanted to work in the Ituri Forest but what he ended up doing is sending his only student who did not care about wet feet. You would be surprised as to how many archaeologists ended up specializing in one area or another because of something utterly tangential to archaeology. Jack Harris studied the Karari Industry because he could back up a truck with a trailer on it. Lew Binford got into archaeology at all because he had time off while a soldier in Korea and ended up bumping into interesting tombs. J. Desmond Clark took an interest in Africa (and, essentially, founded and shaped African Archaeology) for similar reasons; He was assigned to positions with trenches, dug across interesting stratigraphy, while with the British Army in North Africa.

Archaeology:

I once new a graduate student in anthropology who went into graduate school to study a particular system. She was very excited about this system because it had to do with genes, and genes were (here words…) “The Truth” as opposed to, I guess, bones and stuff. That system didn’t work out. She tried another one. Didn’t work out. She tried a different one. Didn’t work out. Finally she discovered an interest in monkeys. Monkeys have genes, interesting ones, and that worked out. Funny how “The Truth” can be such a problem.

Interesting Monkey:

I can’t remember the first time I was ever in a house with air conditioning, but it might have been when I was 13 and my parents moved to a place with an air conditioner. It was not on all the time and it kept the downstairs absurdly cold if the upstairs was cooled at all, so it had little effect on me (living in an uninsulated room over the garage extension and all). My wife, my daughter, my son, lots of people in my wife’s family, others that I know these days all grew up in houses with air conditioning. When my daughter was growing up she did not like wearing coats or sweaters. Her mother always wanted her to do so, because she, the mother, was always cold. Same old story, you’ve heard it before. “I’m cold, put on a sweater!” I conspired with Julia often so she did not have to wear the uncomfortably warm clothing. So, even though she grew up with air conditioning, she grew accustom to cold. So one end of her range of comfort is more open ended than the other. She is skinny and lanky but the heat bothers her. An Inuit trapped in the body of a Maasai warrior.

Air Conditioning:

Speaking of Inuit, a friend of mine is an Aleutian (they historically live on the same end of the planet) and while he grew up in a run of the mill middle class home on a reservation, the home was in Alaska and he spent a fair amount of time on boats in the Bering Sea and on land doing archaeology and stuff on the edge of the Arctic Circle. Then he went to live with reindeer herders in Siberia (the Eveny or Evenki, not the Sámi). I thought it was funny when the first thing he said to me when he returned after his first season of working with them as an anthropologist was this: “I can’t believe how COLD it is there!” And he got to sleep with the best reindeer!

This is him:

Without going into details, it is more or less true that your body adapts early in life, but for the rest of your life, to the range of temperatures to which it is exposed when you are little, after infancy but through toddler years. The way your skin gets configured, with blood vessels and sweat glands and so on, and some things having to do with neurons, adapts to control heating and cooling, and as an evolutionary aside, comfort for a certain range. Lots of things adapt as we grow, but these things are sorely understudied. The assumption that you are a product of your genes right down to the details is too pervasive. For instance, how well you see detail in various conditions adapts. If you grow up in Arizona you will have a different way of seeing than if you grow up in the Pacific North West. Well, not if you grow up in Phoenix vs. Seattle, but if you grow up in the wilderness in those two areas. Colin Turnbull has a story about this in relation to Pygmies which I will not relate because I think Colin put the Bull in Turnbull and I don’t trust most of his stories. But I have an Efe Pygmy story that might relate and is true: If you give some Efe Pygmy men a mammal identification guide so they can pick out a picture of some animal they just saw, so you can relate the observation to Western Linneonormative Classification Schema, they hold the book upside down as often as right side up. That is what we might expect from people who don’t read at all, they hold the book randomly. But then, they’ll start rotating the book around so they see the picture of the monkey “right side up” and “up side down” and everything in between. Then they’ll make their ID. I never see Westerners do that, but it makes sense. A western book held by a western person shows a picture of an animal sitting or standing there, and you hold the book up in normal book position and you imagine you are up in the tree staring at a monkey standing on a branch ten feet away. But in real life, you almost always see monkeys that are above you or nearly above you. In a rain forest, the arboreal mammals that are not above you are too far away to see well, and behind too much vegetation. They are shadows crossing distant gaps. Efe not only see correctly in a forest, but they know how to adapt the book to use it to represent that way of seeing.

And they see better. As I mentioned above, I spent a lot of time in a forest growing up, so I may be better than some Arizonan guy at seeing detail in a forest. But not like the Efe. One time I was talking to my friend (in the Ituri) about a particular species of snake.

“I’d like to see one of those,” I said. We were sitting right in our research camp. He chucked. “What?” I said.

“Come over here,” he stood and walked away beckoning me to follow. I followed.

“There,” he said, pointing.

I looked. I saw nothing but branches and leaves. “What am I looking at?”

“Your snake.”

“Really? Where?” raising my hand to point at the bushes that lined the path down to the water from our base camp. He grabbed my hand to stop it from going near the bush.

“Right in front of you. You almost touched it.”

Now, this is a snake he had seen from about 100 feet away, a snake that I was now in reaching distance of, apparently, but could not see. The snake in question, by the way, was a “boomslang” a.k.a. “green tree snake” … the are small, green, and blend in very nicely with the green trees. Nasty venom. Apparently, this one was perfectly camouflaged.

“I still don’t see it.”

“OK, stand back,” he said as he raised his bow, arming it with a monkey arrow. Efe men always carry their bow and a few arrows with them.

He drew the bow, took a breath to stop himself from giggling (at me), and fired.

And the arrow went through the snake in at least three places, so the now squirming reptile could not extricate itself from the branches it was effectively pinned to. I could finally see it. At first I felt bad that the snake had to die to teach me a lesson, but then it occurred to me that my friend was surely going to kill this snake on his way back to his camp anyway. He had seen it, after all. And, a snake an Efe sees is a dead snake. They do this to keep the chances of being bitten by poisonous snakes down, and since his uncle had lost a leg to a viper in his youth, one could understand this especially in his case.

Boomslang:

But the point is, to him, seeing an 18 inch long green snake in a green bush over 100 feet away was like me seeing my bus coming down the avenue. On a hot day, which I would not think of as too hot because I grew up without air conditioning.

One’s comfort zone, one’s path in life, one’s personal history. A lot of people call it free will, but it’s not.

Sorry for going all Philosophy on you:

Hat Tip: Andrew

The Mocking Bass. For four years this fish watched me cast lures and live bait from the end of the small dilapidated dock in the lagoon behind the cabin, without ever showing interest in what I had to offer. Two weeks ago I dropped a plastic worm on his head. The worm slid off and rested on the bottom. The mocking bass reoriented towards the worm and took a sniff. I jiggled the worm. And, BANG. He took the bait. My drag was set to medium, so WZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ .. he took off across the lagoon. I tightened the drag a little because he was running into brush and he turned direction and jumped. But I kept the rod tip up and used his jump to bring him in. He ran back and forth across the lagoon two more times and then headed out. WZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ against the harder drag with his last bit of strength, and one more jump. Then I brought him in, letting him struggle and tire a little more because they always manage to pull off that one last bit of resistance, the one where you lose most of the big ones. I got on my knees and pulled him out just as he got near the dock… And that fish was THIS BIG!!!!!

It is true that there are many components of the act of fishing that one might do otherwise because they are pleasant things to do. One may socialize, one may entertain the kiddies, one may tool around in a boat, one may visit a local park, one may sit on the shore of a lake or river, one may hang out on the end of a dock taking in some sun or a gentle breeze. If you do any or some combination of these things with a fishing pole in hand does not matter. The fishing may only be the excuse to get outside, get some sun, get some exercise, whatever. Or, one could just be honest with oneself and recognize that the fishing itself does matter after all. And fishing without catching fish …. well, there IS a reason they call it FISHing.

Years ago I would hang out with my friend Robert, and we’d talk about art and politics and enjoy being with each other, but there would be fishing going on at the same time. These days I hang out with my friend Asha and we talk about relationships, running, racism, and all sorts of things that start with the letter “R” and there is also fishing going on at the same time. But the truth is that although the friendship and the sunshine and the breeze are all warm and worthy of effort, we are also paying attention to the fish. Or lack thereof. So Robert and I would prefer the harder to reach but more likely to produce pond, or we would row across the lake to the good spot, or leave an unproductive shore for another with more potential. Asha and I are interested in exploring each other’s past and learning about each other’s interests, but we are also exploring the local lakes and rivers, and learning about what baits are working to actually catch some fish.

Indeed, there is something that I enjoy immensely that utterly goes against the concept that it is the experience, not the fish that I will be happy to tell you about. Here at the cabin, I spend most of the daylight hours in one place or another where I can see either the bay on one side of the property or the small shallow embayment that we call the “Lagoon” on the other side, or the channel that connects them. I am observant and attuned to the signs of nature. I am aware of the direction of the wind, the twist of the current, the shoal of the baitfish, and the position of the shade from shoreline trees. Even in my peripheral vision, I notice the surface spoor and the indicated pattern of movement of predators such as the northern pikes. I am one with the herons, the eagles, and the loons who are also following the fish. Their movements and activities are a book I know how to read. I know when and where the fish will bite before the fish themselves know it. I am the fish. I am Kung Fu Fish.

On the porch leaning against the faux redwood table is a light tackle rig and a medium tackle rig. At the moment, the medium rig has a Mepps Agila #5, and the light tackle is rigged with a plastic worm a little heavy for the line but sometimes I take chances. At some moment during the day conditions will change. I will perceive some piscene activity, a sign of predatory movement, a disturbance among the minnows. Right now a brisk breeze is pressing the natural flotsam against the bay shore so within casting range there are tens of thousands of minnows. Too many minnows. And the water is choppy so a lure has too much competition for attention. The clouds tell me that the breeze will lighten up in the next hour or two, but then it will be too warm. But after another hour or two I expect the stirred up highly oxygenated lagoon to be a place of activity. As conditions change, I may change the lures on the rigs leaning against the table out on the porch. Later on, the bluegills may start feeding off the surface on flying insects. In their state of distraction the smaller ones will be prey for the bass, or perhaps the tiger muskies that occasionally pass through under conditions like this. A well placed medium Mepps Agila or a weedless crank bait will do the trick. I will watch for signs of the fish becoming active, and in their state of hunger and the simple fishy-limbic distraction of pursuit, becoming careless as well.

And then, I will select the appropriate tackle rig and walk down to the lagoon. I will choose the spot from which I will cast. I will see the rise or the ripple. I will cast. If no fish takes the bait on that single cast, then the fish have won and I will retire to the cabin to meditate, over a glass of chilled chocolate tequila, on what I did wrong. Or, it will be the fish, and not me, making the mistake. And I will land the bass or the muskellunge, there will be a brief knowing eye contact between us, and I will release it. And only the fish and I will understand that I am the one-cast kung fu fish master.

Other times, I just cast and cast and cast and nothing happens and if you ask me what I’m doing, I’ll say: “Actually, this is good core body exercise. Actually, I’m mainly practicing accuracy in casting. In fact, actually, I hope no fish bite, it would actually ruin all the fun!”

And you would think, “Man, what a loser!”