Tom schmitt wrote:

After thinking about all of this for a bit there are a couple items that are open for debate and more study.
#1 If the DNR’s study was flawed in allowing <strong class=”ido-tag-strong”>crappies to return to depth, why did the shallower caught fish have better survival? They still had to battle the net the same as the deep fish.
#2 If over handling fish caused mortality, why was there less mortality when fish were caught shallower?

Cumulative effects is the issue. It’s the exponential impact of a combination of things. The shallower fish have less stress on them to begin with, and they used a larger cylinder on the shallower tests which may have made it a bit easier to get down. Imagine if the fish were caught from 5ft of water – they would have likely survived fine in any size net.

Tom schmitt wrote:

#3 What difference does it make to put the fish in the water mouth up, when their gills are behind their mouth and will vent air just as well?

Putting them in backwards is as much or more about making sure there’s no slush or snow in their mouth. There’s probably a little pocket of air right by their throat that is trapped if you put them straight in – and if you don’t close the mouth, their gills almost seal at the back and there will be lots of air in their mouth.

The video by gord pyzer is terrible. The title and the message is that you can fish unethically deep now with this product.

duh queen wrote:

I didn’t watch Aaron’s video, but I did have the opportunity to read the whole DNR study. My question is: how is Aaron assessing mortality 24 and 48 hours post release?
A second question involves bias, and not that of the “testers”, but of the readers’. I suspect that if the sources were switched (Aaron’s “study” was swapped with the DNR’s), that many of the same folks who disagreed with the DNR would still disagree because many are biased against them, not the study.
Personally, until someone like Aaron can show me his scientific credentials, the results remain suspect. The folks who designed and conducted the DNR study have those credentials if a master’s degree in a hard science means anything.
I’ve got nothing bad to say about Aaron or his study. Just questions. Did he do what the DNR did and look at mortality rates 1 & 2 days post release? If not, his “data” is meaningless.

Is this the queen of England? If watching the video isn’t of interest to you, how could discussing the video possibly be worth your time?

Tom schmitt wrote:

Weibe’s complaint of the fish being over handled may be a little over-rated.
Mille Lacs band did a survey where they caught fish, took them to a centrally located boat, inserted a telemetry device into the fish, then returned them to the original location.

With all of that, they had 5% mortality.
This really shows the flaw in their hooking mortality rate, but it also shows that fish can handle a little more handling than we think.

One other note to consider, how often have you brought fish home in the winter that were laying on the ice, put them in water to rinse off and watched them revive and swim around.

The DNR’s study was a step in the right direction. Hopefully Weibe’s video will show them the flaws in their study, and they resolve them.

Hi Tom, I agree with you about how durable and resilient fish can be! They are simultaenously indestructible and extremely fragile. This dynamic is common among cold-blooded animals, and I think it’s more because we don’t relate with them, so the things that they can tolerate vs cannot are often against our thinking.

It all comes down to cumulative effects (or the cumulative affect). Typically, it seems a fish can survive almost any one bad stressor. But if that bad thing is combined with even one additional medium stressor, it has an exponential affect and fatal outcome. Some examples of bad stressors would be barotrauma, warm water, deeply-hooked, and extended handling time. When it comes to all four, there are massive unknowns with delayed mortality; however it seems like if there are no additional stressors, that the fish has a decent chance. I am not familiar with the study you mentioned, but I assume that barotrauma, warm water, and deeply-hooked were not involved at all to magnify the affect of the excessive handling you described.

Neither their pilot study or my video show anything about delayed mortality. The methods of their study killed the fish pre-emptively, and my video simply demonstrated that those were “releasable” fish. Still, I said countless times that deep water fishing has dangerous unknowns and is best avoided.

The DNR/Lindner study did not have a hidden agenda. Everyone on site meant well, but they had an anticipated outcome, and they all took for granted that the sum of the parts had a handle on things. It is worth considering that even after everything has been presented about this, many of the people in this conversation thread still have the same bias on this topic as the DNR/Lindners did beforehand.

Gitchi Gummi wrote:

However, there is one thing I couldn’t get past… the whole video he kept preaching minimal handling and quick releasing as being of the utmost importance in the survival of these fish…. All that kept playing in the back of my head was this video from a few years ago where Aaron literally caught a 5 gallon bucket full of 16” crappies that he released who knows, 5, 10, 15 minutes later because he didn’t want to potentially spook the school. By his own scientific theories and conclusions, all of those fish likely died because of his poor handling of the fish to selfishly try to get some good pics and video footage. Granted, he was fishing a little shallower in that video (26 ft I believe), he needs to practice what he preaches.

Firstly, you are absolutely right that the messaging in the video with the 5 gallon pail was poor. Before and after that video I have always been consistent on expedited handling, and despite my justification to follow, this is a confusing deviation from that and probably should not have been done.

In my defence, the school was actually only 7-10 feet down, which is why I was so concerned about spooking them, and is why barotrauma was not a cumulative affect. There was water in the pail and the fish released well. Regardless, I agree the messaging was poor.

Karry Kyllo wrote:

Just because fish return to the bottom doesn’t mean they’ll survive. Fish suffering from barotrauma can look fine but have injuries including things like eversion, prolapse, torsion and volvulus of the stomach, hemorrhaging of internal organs, hematomas, and loss of vision that may all reslut in delayed mortality.

That is a very informative google search, thank you!

The demonstration I did of releasing the fish caught from 34-37 ft of water, was only to show that the mortality listed in the MN DNR study was overstated, and that many deep-caught fish are releasable. For the last 10-20 years, “common knowledge” has been that a deep-caught crappie only has the energy to swim partway down, and then floats up under the ice to die. I have never witnessed, experienced, or seen media evidence of this – but I do believe it happens in some scenarios. I know it happens to fish involved in photoshoots, culled fish, and fish held in restrictive net pens for studies.

I made no claims about delayed mortality. That’s next.