An explanation of the philosophy behind some of the fishing rules.

Killing smaller fish and releasing the bigger ones is a strange concept to some people. A fish (or any living organism) that has attained an above average size has done so by making optimum use of its environment at all levels. This includes:

• Feeding strategy and behaviour (which is both instinctive and learned) and the ability of the fish’s body to extract the maximum nutrition, energy and growth requirements from that food, which is genetic.
• Avoiding predation. Fish need to avoid predation at all times, which is again both instinctive (i.e. genetic) and learned.
• Minimising exposure to less than optimum environmental conditions. The more time a fish spends living within optimal environmental conditions, the quicker it will grow and the healthier it will be (and ultimately the bigger it could grow). Again, through instinctive and learned behaviour, fish tend to seek out optimum conditions of water temperature, water salinity, food availability, lack of predation, etc.

A large fish is proof that it is a master of its surroundings with the perfect survival formulae for its chosen environment. But even if all fish could make the same optimum use of their environments, they wouldn’t necessarily all grow to trophy size. To reach trophy proportions a fish must posses the genes that not only instinctively drive it to make the best use of its environment but also the genes to grow large. Interestingly, it is thought that learned behaviour could be passed on to subsequent generations as instinct. A stud farmer never kills his prime breeding stock; he never slaughters his prize bull, why should fish be any different? In nature, for any given species, the highest mortality rate is at the lowest part of the population pyramid, i.e. a larger proportion of smaller/younger fish die than larger/older fish. If fish are to be killed, killing larger numbers of smaller fish is thus in keeping with nature’s scheme.

Big fish not only produce more eggs (and in some cases exponentially more eggs), they are also more experienced breeders. Many marine fish species form spawning congregations at sea during breeding, at which time they are very susceptible to predation, especially by sharks. A fish having reached a large size implies it has spawned a number of times and is not only directly valuable to the resource due to the number of young it will produce, but also due to the successful genetic formulae that it will pass on to its young. Larger fish are, generally speaking, poorer table fare, either due to the consistency of the flesh and/or the density of parasites.

Where at all possible, we tend to bias our fish consumption towards the faster growing species. The slower growing an organism is, the more susceptible it is to over exploitation as it takes adults longer to mature.