rough fish

i over heard some guys talking in a bait shop last week and i was looking for some clarification on what i thought i heard. is it true that it’s illegal to through back any rough fish? they also said you can’t kill them and you can’t through them on shore. what are you supposed to do then? keep ’em in the well with the fish you plan on eating and then through them in the trash when you get home for the garbage man to deal with? thats doesn’t make much sense.

if this is actually the law then i’ve sure seen a lot of people breaking it; myself included. just can’t wait until some really bored DNR officer starts giving tickets for through back a sheephead.

There is absolutely no truth to this…. you can return a rough fish to the water from which it was caught. This is just a case of old guys with too much time on their hands making up stories.

thanks for clearing that up. now i still won’t feel bad about throughing them things back

Doesn’t it depend on your location? I thought that Iowa still had a blue law on the books to this effect. I’ve never seen or heard of it enforced, but in some areas, they still have ‘carp cans’ in which to dispose of rough fish. Below the spillway at Coralville there used to be a bunch. I guess I haven’t paid attention.

Did anyone hear a news story about a Japanese fish that kills everything else that is found in the waters? My wife said something about it tonight – apparently they found it in three waterways on the east coast. They must be real nasty critters, too, since the news said they could ‘walk on land and live for 3 days breathing through primitive lungs.’ They said the found young specimines on land and believed that it was spawning.

I tried to find a link, but couldn’t come up with one.

Gianni….. I think the fish your referring to is called a Walking Catfish. They will go from lake to lake and kill everything in it. I believe there origin in Africa. And yes they are Nasty Critters. And Ugly!!!

There is an oriental carp that is working its way up the mississippi that has had some folks really concerned. They are coming and will be a force to be reckoned with. They eat everything that is good and are really difficult to eradicate because they are very large. They can jump several feet in the air. There was an article recently in the Lax Trib. I will try and locate it.

Here is that article:

http://www.lacrossetribune.com/outdoors/00lead.php

yikes… hard to say what the impact of the goby and big head carp will be on our ecosystem… but one thing for sure.. an ecosystem will only support just so much biomass and these fish will change the allocation of biomass… sounds like it could be the death knell of the paddlefish as these fish are certain to outcompete them… I would guess that snagging bighead carp might become quite a sport… but I cant imagine taking one in the kisser while tooling on the river on plain…. Ive had close encounters with another asian carp.. the white amur.. they can really jump too.. we were trying to net them out of our rearing ponds and I had to hold the nets up to try and keep them in…. I took one 40# torpedo amidships.. and it sank me good….. as one leaped up about 7-8 feet nailed me right between the eyes.. much to the amusement of everyone else… to bad there was no video of it!!….

Gianni,
I saw that bit on the news the other night, too, about the ones they’ve found in Maryland. The DNR out there has tried everything to catch them, including netting, traps, and just plain hook and a bobber, to no avail. They said they’ve got them pretty much narrowed down to one large pond, but weren’t sure if they had spread yet or not. Those things are nasty looking. Hope they don’t make it here!

Mark

I response to the original post, it is illegal to return a rough fish to the water if it is injured. We were stopped by the DNR about 10 years ago and my old man was taking a hook out of a bull head. The officer warned us that we could not release the fish back into the water since it was bleeding. I know that laws change, but I think that this is still the case.

Funny thing though, if you have an injured 18″ walleye from Mille Lacs it MUST be released. Meanwhile an injured 18″ eelpout would have to be kept. But I wont get into that.

There’s no “carp cans” up here in MN that I’m aware of. All fish are “injured” to some degree when caught. Return everything you don’t eat to the water from which it was caught… unharmed.

When I was a kid in the 70’s, I believe it was illegal to throw carp back in Minnesota. I’m sure that the law only applied to carp and not to native species like sheepshead, buffalo, suckers etc. I was curious about when this law was passed and when it changed, so I contacted the DNR a few months ago. They confirmed that it was a law at one point, but was dropped sometime in the early 80’s. They didn’t give me the exact dates. Anyone else remember this? It was just a failed attempt at getting rid of the carp. It seems like a lot of people out there still believe that releasing carp is illegal. Take as many as you want, but if you are not going to use them for something, I’d rather see them released than laying all over the bank or filling garbage cans. Vern

Back in the late 60’s when I was in high school I had a summer job with the F&W Service. One of our duties was to go to the lock and dams where people snagged fish off the walls and pick up all the dead fish a couple times a month. I asked why these fish were left to die and the boss said it was illegal to put them back in the water. Made a smelly mess for sure. This was in the lansing and genoa areas.

The fish you are referring to was called a “snakehead”. The segment was aired on one of the network news channels last night,but I don’t know which one.

Here is a url to an article that contains a picture: http://199.250.30.114/fishing/news-rel/snakehead.html

If you ever see one, don’t return it to the water!

The news story was on ABC. The Snakehead was found in Maryland. Here is a link to the ABC story. http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/DailyNews/invasivefish020709.html

Those snakeheads look like a dogfish but with some nasty attitude. I sure wouldn’t want to wrestle with one of those.

I see in today’s news that the snakehead fish has been found in seven U.S. states now. The Maryland DNR initially found them in a pond, I believe about 80 small ones. Now, after failed attempts to iradicate them, they are considering poisoning the pond to kill all of them. Hope they never get here, especially since a few of the SE Asian countries believe that they are “reincarnated sinners”. LOL!! Also, Interior Secretary Gail Norton is supposed to be announcing plans to ban the importation of 28 subspecies of them.

Mark