Why Everything You Know About Black Bass Management is Likely Wrong with Dr. David Philipp

Thank you for joining us. This is the Fishery Podcast, a weekly podcast that shares the stories of the amazing people and projects that make up Fishery's science. If you haven't already, follow the podcast on social media at Fishery's Pod. If you're the generous sword, you can be like Ben, Janet, John, Garrett, Brian, and Jerry, who all support the podcast on Patreon. Through Patreon, you are able to support the show with either a recurring or one-time donation, which helps us pay for various parts of the show. If that isn't your thing, you can also purchase Fishery's Pod merch on our tea spring store, if you feel inclined. So check it out. Our guest today is Dr. David Philip. For over 30 years, Dr. Philip directed the Fish Genetics and Conservation Lab at the Illinois Natural History Survey, a research department within the Prairie Research at the University of Illinois. His research group has helped to document the evolutionary effects that human impacts can have on natural populations, including how recreational angling affects survival, migration, reproductive success, and annual recruitment of wild fish populations, as well as to demonstrate the negative impacts that can result from hatchery stalking programs. As one of the founders of the Fishery's Conservation Foundation, bracers as Chair of its Board of Directors, Dave works to develop both educational and research-based programs for the conservation and management of fisheries, including projects in Bruton, Canada, the U.S., Pakistan, Nepal, Thailand, and the Bahamas. So welcome, Dave, to the podcast. I'm super excited to have Dave here with us today as my first guest on the Fishery's podcast as a new host. Dave and I have spent a ton of time together in the field for the past two summers snorkeling and looking at spawning bass in eastern Ontario. Today we're going to be chatting about why everything you know about black bass management is likely wrong. And so I think everyone has got to be here and talk about all of this great topic. It is a bit of an interesting kind of shot from the dark that came out. I got a phone call working in Illinois at the University of Illinois from a young professor who was doing a postdoc out at Simon Fraser University working on blue-gill reproductive strategies, Mart Gross. And we started talking. He wanted to do a study looking at artificial insemination of female eggs with different types of males and then growing them out to see if the cuckoldry parental male bifurcation was genetic or not. And so that's how it all started. I came up, helped to make the crosses. We raised them up and showed that it was definitely a there was a huge genetic influence in it. And we kept on working here at up at the out of the Queens University biology station. And it was a fabulous place to go much prettier than central Illinois, which is in the middle of the corn soybean desert. So I really enjoyed working up here and had been working for a number of years. Probably seven or eight on blue-gills when some of the local guides came to the manager of the biology station, Frank Falen, with a great concern that the number of illegal preseason anglers that were out on the lakes was increasing radically so that they were worried that there was so much angling on nesting bass that it might be hurting the populations. And it was there anybody at Queens that could help out looking at that. And he came to us, Julie and I, and a couple of the graduate students and we discussed what could be done. And by the next year, that was in 1989 and by 1990 we had a project started, which was our first kind of underwater snorkeling looking at the the amount of and impacts of angling on nesting bass. And we did it in four different locations. A warm lake, which was openekon, a deep cold lake, which was Charleston, a warm river, which was the Mississippi River, and then a cold river, which was really cold, the St. Lawrence River. And so that really got us started and we learned we learned a ton of things in those first three or four years, including that there was plenty of fishing going on. And then we just kept done monitoring it and saw then it really ramp up. And we now now that many of the populations are in trouble because of that. Did you have your cottage at the time, Dave? During the or did you? No, we worked. So we bought our cottage here on Lake Opinikon because now that it's like our home, home away from home. And it's on the same lake as the biology station. So that makes everything really worthwhile. But we bought this in 2011. So for my first year at Queens was 1982. So for 30 plus years, we worked out of the biology station, living at the biology station during the summer field months, raised a family there, and pretty much lived with everyone on the station. And it was a fabulous experience. The biology station is a real hotbed for scientific research, but intellectual challenges and intellectual sharing. And it's one of the best places in the world, I would say, to do field research on, certainly on fish. But there are people there doing work on every other type of organism. It is a fabulous jewel in Ontario. And are you able to explain a little bit about the life history of bass and how that all works? Sure. Sure, because that really comes down to be the key for lots of what we're doing and what we fail to do as managers, etc. And there's really a lot of misunderstanding by not only the anglers and the general public, but basically by the fisheries biologists and managers across the country, all throughout North America as well. So as probably most individuals know that in the springtime, bass, the male bass, move into the shallows, look for places to build nests, then clear out nests, but they fan out with their caudal tails, depression in either the gravel or the sand or the grass, depending upon which species, etc. And they build this nest and then wait for females to show up. When that's about 12 or 13 degrees and when it gets a little warmer, then females move into the shallows, checking out the males. They look at a whole bunch of the males to see which ones they want to spawn with and they're looking for the best dads. So when they decide on who they want to spawn with, then they'll move into the nests and the males and females will circle, drop, she'll go over on her side, extrude 10 to 20 eggs at a time and they can spawn for less than an hour up to a number of hours, laying a few hundred eggs up to several thousand eggs and maybe more, depending upon the species, these eggs fall to the ground or fall to the substrate and they stick immediately to the rocks that are exposed, etc. or wood. But when she's done spawning, she leaves and leaves the male alone to guard the nest and the babies from prospective predators. And he spends a lot of energy fanning the eggs to make sure that it's oxygenated water, cleaning up the eggs after they've hatched and then guarding them from predators, which are usually smaller fish like sunfish, perch, minnows, etc. that will come into the nest and try to eat these. The much larger bass will physically remove them by ramming them or if they're small enough, by just simply by eating them. And that's very important. It takes about three days for the eggs to hatch, but when they hatch, they're just little balls of yolk, not even any eyes developed yet, just the little ball of yolk with a barely moving tail. And so then they need about another 10 or 12 days before they have developed eyes and pigmentation and can actually rise up and start swimming. And so that's about two weeks before they're swimming and then they have a day or two before they have to start eating, but they can still be using their yolk sack cup. But then once they start eating, then they need another full three to four weeks of eating and growing till they're over an inch long before they can recognize predators and learn to how to escape them. That's a total of about four to six weeks depending upon the temperature of the water. Where they absolutely need the male parental guard there to provide parental care and protection against brood predators. If that male leads or is removed for any reason, for a short time, the sunfish will come in and eat a number of eggs until he returns, and then he'll drive them off. But if he leaves for good or is removed either by a predator, human or not, then very shortly, all of the eggs or fry are eaten. And that happens for, that's the case for five to six weeks. Most individual anglers and biologists think that once they're up off the nest and free swimming, they're good to go and everything's copesthetic and they're successful, but that's not the case. They need those full five to six weeks. So, that's a huge component that makes all of this in markets kind of unique in their really obligatory male parental care, but it's extra long for all of the black basses. So, that's where kind of management and anglers ideas break down, catch and release angling. If a male bass is caught while they're guarding the nest and immediately removed and then immediately released, yes, they go back to the nest and if it's very quick, the amount of predation is not too heavy. If it's delayed, say, if there's been some photographs and the boat has drifted off a few hundred feet and they're released and he has to find back the nest and it takes a number of minutes to get back, then it can be severe because about half the nest is gone in the first eight to ten minutes and so if this happens once or twice, surely the number of eggs that are left in the nest are just not enough to make it worth all of the effort that he's going to be facing to raise it for the rest of the time, so he'll abandon the nest and so once he has abandoned that nest or if he's never returned to the water, that nest is gone and so there's absolutely no reproductive success from that nest and then that hurts recruitment. And so, how do the females choose which male is the best male? That's a very critical, that great question. That's a critical aspect in what's driving the whole system. So females want to spawn with the best males because they're essentially putting that male in charge of their babies, their eggs, right? So they want the most aggressive, biggest, baddest, toughest male that will guard their babies and that's usually the biggest, because they're more aggressive, they can defend against more fish and bigger fish, etc. So they're looking for predominantly the biggest and most aggressive individuals. That's sexual selection, that's what's happening and so that's what's driving this system that the males want to be the biggest males out there and therefore attract females if you're one of the smallest males that the females can choose, oftentimes you get zero eggs. And so how do the male bass grow? Okay, well, all fish, including the females do this as well because there's similar things that are driving female size too. But so when you see, most biologists, when they portray how fish grow, it's this nice curve that rises up and then slowly levels off and keeps on going out and because fish are indeterminate growers, that's what science has said and everybody, many anglers just think they just keep on growing at a steady rate and the long they live, the bigger they get. And theoretically that is the case, but bass don't, no individual bass grows that way. There are, they grow in a, in an interesting way where there's two distinct periods and so there's, and there's so there's four components to how big a fish gets in its lifetime. The first is how fast it grows until it matures, how fast it grows after it matures, when it matures at what age and then how long it lives. And it's interesting because the bass really doesn't have any individual control over three out of the four of those components. But before it's mitering, as it's a young juvenile, it's eating everything it can get its mouth around and it's trying to grow as fast as it can grow, it really doesn't have the ability to say, you know, I think I want to just grow faster so I'm going to start eating more. It's already trying to do that. Similarly, after it matures, it's also trying to do that, right? It's trying to regroup after its recoup energy after its spawn and keep on growing. So there's two quite different rates, however. So they grow quite rapidly until they mature and then it really slows down, okay? And basically the individual can't control those two rates in its lake. It also can't control how long it lives because death usually through predation, oftentimes by humans, but it's something that's kind of a stochastic event. The bass can't really, to say, I want to live for four more years and then go out and do that because it could get nailed, but the next time it swims around in a rock, but what it can do is it can change the age at which it matures. All of the sun fishes, that is the family of centricity, which are all of the blue gills, pumpkin seeds, croppies, rock basses, all that, and all of the black basses, small mouth, large mouth, all the rest of the 19 species of black bass, okay? Have, are very plastic in their age at maturation. They can, so large mouth bass in, and small mouth bass in Canada that can mature as early as three years of age when they're, say, 180, even as small as 180 millimeters, or they can delay maturation until they're maybe eight or nine years when they're well over 400 millimeters in total length. So, and how they do that determines how big they get. The later they wait until they mature, the more years they grow at that super fast pre-maturation growth rate. So, a male that matures at age three at, say, 200 millimeters can start to spawn at that third, at that third year, but by the time, even if it spawns for another five years or so, may not get to be even 300 millimeters long. A male, however, that waits to age six or seven when it's 400 millimeters, having grown at six or seven years at that fast rate, and then maturs, can now spawn for oftentimes much longer, but, say, another six or seven years, and we'll top out at, say, 450 or 500 millimeters. So, that age at maturation is the critical determining factor in how big a basket and, therefore, is really the dominant force in determining determining population size structure. Interestingly, very, very few fisheries biologists and managers and anglers know about that and take that into consideration in all of their management plans. So, there you have. What's the hypothesis that managers are typically using for how vast grow or how size structure is determined? Okay, and that's based on what they feel stunted populations are. A stunted population is considered a stockpiling of small fish that don't very get very much bigger and grow really slowly because there's so many little fish in the system that their pre maturation growth rate is really slow. So, the hypothesis on that is that this density dependent slow growth causes much slower growth for the first, say, six years. So, that instead of in six years getting up to 400 millimeters, in six years, the fish only get to 200 millimeters, but they still mature then at the same age, at age six, but now they are much smaller, at, say, 300 millimeters or 250 millimeters, and with the post-maturation growth rate reduction, it almost flatlines, right, at this point, and so they never get any bigger, no matter how long they live. And so, it's all, it puts all of the onus on there being too many little fish and therefore not enough growth. And the management strategy to fix that would be to decrease the number of small fish. You can do that in two ways. One, by increasing harvest through angling, which is difficult to do in these days since most fishing, most fast fishing is catch and release, or you can go in and remove fish. And there are states down in the US that are experimenting with fish removals and although there are a few examples where the population is getting some increase in size, there are many that there's been no effect. In the, in the early life history hypothesis, [BLANK_AUDIO] There is, it's not that there are too many little fish out there causing a density-dependent growth problem. There are too many, there are not enough big fish out there to make the smaller fish delay maturation to compete. So as bigger fish in a population start dying out through overharvest or recruitment over fishing anyway, then it gives the opportunity for smaller and younger fish to mature. And so they can do that and still become competitive. If they're not replaced because, again, recruitment is low, then smaller and smaller fish. Until the whole population sinks back down into where fish are maturing as early as they can possibly do it physiologically, which is, in Ontario, is age three down in Florida, maybe age one. But it's basically when they get to be about, you know, 200 millimeters or even less. And so there's two quite distinct hypotheses on this. Not very many people are aware of the early maturation hypothesis and people are not taking the right, collecting the right data on stunning populations to even figure that out what's going on except we have been doing that here in Ontario and we see a perfect correlation with hypothesis, that number two hypothesis, the early maturation. We have a number of populations that I'll just give small mouthbass where, and there are four that I like to use as a good example because they're all interconnected. They're all within about three or four miles of each other. I'm not going to give you the names of them. Lake associations don't want us to talk in those specifics. But these four lakes very tremendously, even though in their size structure, even though back in the 70s, they all had large, large bass presence. Right, we've seen the fish diaries that say that they were catching 450 to 500 millimeter fish out there and the fishing was good. Now in some lakes, it's not that the same. So for example, in one population that we consider kind of a trophy population, we look at the size, well, first of all, we look at the size structure of nesting males. These are the males that are actually mature, and so instead of having a mixture of males and females and non-mature and immature, I mean, immature and mature fish, which gives you a nice size structure graph, but doesn't tell you anything about specifically what the population is doing in regards to maturation and the size. And so by comparing just nesting males, we're looking at the same population with the same type group of individuals within each of these different populations. So it's a fair and honest comparison of how the fish are growing and the population size structure is among the various lakes. So in the trophy population that we have here, the smallest nesting male was 14 inches. The largest nesting male was 21 inches with a medium of around 17 and a half. And there were two that were smaller all the way down to a third one that was really small, and one might say stunted, in that the size of the nesting males went from nine inches to 13 inches. Not even the largest nesting male there was smaller than the smallest nesting male in the trophy population, and the average was 10 and a half. So 10 and a half versus 17 and a half. Then we look at the growth rate of the one year olds, the sizes of the one year old. So the initial pre maturation growth rate, the largest individuals were in the stunted population. They were 125 millimeters on average long in July. And in the trophy population, they were 103. So there was an inverse correlation between the size of the adults and the size of the one year olds showing that there was not a lack of food in the, in the stunted population. When we look at age maturation in these four populations, the oldest, the biggest fish, the biggest, the lake with the largest males, the average age maturation was 6.8. So seven years, the smallest was 3.2. So these lakes here in southern Ontario are clearly behaving under hypothesis to early maturation. There is no stunting because of slow growth and overpopulation in the lakes that we've looked at. And right now that's up to 24 of our study populations. That's what we're seeing. So down south, however, it could be different. We're talking certainly largemouth and Florida, and Florida bass as well. And a mixture of those two, they could have very different, they do have different life histories. Much longer growing seasons, longevity that there are some populations in the south that are operating under hypothesis number one. That's a huge question right now, and we're trying to get to that by forming a joint partnership among a variety of the states and Ontario looking at age maturation and size structure and growth, et cetera, of stunning populations and trophy populations in each of these various areas from, basically, Manitoba down through Florida. And we're working on collecting some of those fish during the, it has to be during the spawning season, we want to have, we want to do this with nesting males to go out like we have been doing and look at this and we're hoping to get maybe 10 different states along with Manitoba and Ontario to look at their bass populations to see how things are changing and whether or not and where each of these different hypotheses are rolling, because the current management solution in the south is to remove large numbers, huge numbers of small bass from these studded population. If in fact they're actually small because of early maturation that is exactly the wrong thing to be doing. You need to protect the spawning males and keep the population high so that it forces through competition males to delay maturation to become larger and larger. The issue is it's very easy to take a population that has large late maturing adults and crash that down through overharvest, but it's a lot harder to build it back up through from a studded population to large late maturing adults because that's more of an evolutionary process and that takes longer. So if we bring it back down to what's happening in Ontario, what are the rules of management strategies that they have here in eastern Ontario and are they effective at all? Good question, there's really two types for bass now, there's two different regulations that are in place that are meaningful. The first is the bag limits, so harvest limits that you're allowed to, there's two different licenses so you're allowed to either harvest two or six daily combination large male-small male and that's reasonable. In fact, however, in over the whole year, the bass fisheries are probably 80% to 90% catch and release. So only on opening day is there this massive harvest or opening weekend, this massive harvest focus where everybody traditionally goes out and catches their limit and maybe not may never even go fishing again for the rest of the year. However, so the bag limits really probably don't have much of an influence on the population itself. The other regulation that is designed to protect bass, however, is a closed season. So from December, January 1st through the third Saturday in June, anglers are not allowed to fish for bass, that means nesting bass, you're not allowed to target nesting bass. The problem comes in is that fishing seasons for other fish are open, pretty much all other fish species, so you can go and fish anywhere on the lake for blue gills or pumpkin seeds or rock bass or walleye or pike or whatever you're doing and you may accidentally catch a nesting largemouth bass because it's in that same area. you may also be unscrupulous. actually go and locate nesting basses visually because they're so easy to see. You can even see the fish on the nest and know how big it is. And they're very vulnerable to angling. And so you could be unscrupulous and go and simply catch and release large mouth bass nesters in huge numbers, taking them off their nest, creating a loss in reproduction by through predation. But really, even if you release them all, you know, and that creates a problem if there is enough of that going on. And that's what the guides were originally worried about back in 1989. Well, it has since the 90s, that level of illegal preseason angling has exploded. Probably now it's about five or six times what it was back then, you know, in Lake O'Pinnacan, which is on the canal, but it's separated. There are, it's the only lake in between two locks. There's not a lot of, not a lot of anglers that travel long distances just to come into fish in in O'Pinnacan. And there's not a whole lot of public access, only a few public ramps. So our pressure in this lake is not that large compared to some of the others that are closer to Ottawa or Kingston. You can see it just by the number of boats out there. But in the last few years, we've estimated from our swims and looking at hook wounds that each nesting male has been captured on a nesting male, like O'Pinnacan has been captured around three times somewhere between two and four times depending upon the year. That's a huge number. And because of that, the reproductive success has dropped since 2000, has dropped by 80 percent. And the recruitment now is even worse, maybe 90 percent. So in the last few years, we've had almost no year classes produced because of catch and release angling during the nesting season. So catch and release is considered by most anglers, for sure, is considered benign. You know, what could possibly go wrong when you're to catch and fish and just releasing them? Well, not all of them survived that event, but even if they do, when they're spawning, it's essentially taking away their reproductive success. So even though they're out there swimming around, if they don't have babies, they're not contributing to the next population. And so we have this chronic, what we call, recruitment over fishing. And essentially, to varying extent in all of the lakes around, certainly FMZ18, you know, or in Southern Ontario, but probably to some extent, all across the North America and any bass lake, where there's this chronic over recruitment over fishing so that the amount of reproduction and the ensuing year classes from that is not enough to replace the dying populations that the older individuals that are nesting. So populations are becoming lower in number, starting out with the larger individuals are not being replaced by the ones that are just a little bit younger as they grow older because there aren't as many because each year class has been smaller and smaller and smaller. As those largest individuals are now not replaced, younger and smaller individuals are maturing, right? Because of the the age of maturation plasticity and sexual selection by the females. And that just over time, depending upon how bad it's been, it can be crashing down pretty quickly, like the one standard lake we talked about, or not very much, like the trophy lake that's still in producing pretty good bass. So, you know what, then there's quite a difference between a small mouth bass that's 541 millimeters versus one that's 179 millimeters on the nest. And you should know that quite distinctly pretty. And that's where we stand right now is that in all of these lakes, there are this chronic recruitment overfishing, which is pushing populations, not only down biomass-wise, but down size-wise as well. So, they're getting smaller and smaller. And yet it's interesting because as we as they get smaller, they're also more four-year-olds than there are seven-year-olds in a population on average, right? So, there are still, as we're getting the smaller and smaller males, there are still a reasonable numbers of those as they go down, but pretty soon it will just kind of bottom out. And at some point, the absolute nightmare is reaching a tipping point where there is so little recruitment, there are so little reproductive success that all of the babies are eaten by the predators, so that there's zero-year class. And when you reach that tipping point, then you got a real problem. And the most famous example of that is the cod population off of Newfoundland, which for years and years was overfished. But, and everybody is saying, but there's still tons of adults out there, and the modelers in the biologists said, "Yeah, but there are no-year classes, but there's still tons of adults. They must be coming from somewhere." And it's just that they were there for the last little bit of spawning, and eventually it just crashed. And that was in 1994, when that, no, 1992, when that moratorium went on, it was supposed to end in 1994, two years later, when everything was going to be copacetic. And where is it now? No where. That's what we would worry about, for certain vast populations could be in trouble of, like, approaching that level of effective extirpation. And so we have management strategies that are definitely known. Working are not effective here in eastern Ontario. Yeah, it's not effective. Oh, right. The closed season, the closed season is the most ineffectual regulation on the face of the planet. So we think that there needs to be innovative strategies to do other things. And, you know, one of the things that, so we have, for years, talked to the ministry about using bass boning sanctuaries to guard against that. These would be areas of the lake that would be closed to all fishing to allow some basic minimum of natural reproduction to occur and reproduction to occur under the normal rules of sexual selection. Right now, I mean, females are still selecting the biggest toughest males, but they're making the wrong decision, actually, because those are the ones that are being angled and harvested. It's the small wimpy males that are the ones that are not being caught and are the ones that are effectively raising the babies in the year class. So this, these bass boning sanctuaries would be good for a whole number of different angles as a real safety valve against evolution and then recruitment overfishing and all of that. Well, we approach the ministry three times, but it wasn't until COVID hit that we convinced them. Because in COVID, we got this whole lake experiment to do exactly what we were talking about where there was no fishing. Because in 2020 and 2021 in the lakes around here, there was essentially almost no fishing. Americans weren't allowed across the border, boat ramps were closed. People were discouraged from coming to their cottages. We followed that in Lake O'Pinnacan and saw that that was indeed the case. So instead of having loads of hookwounds and angling pressure and almost zero recruitment, we just flipped the script. They were still about the same number of males and females spawning and all of that, but the number of successful nests were huge. The amount of reproduction was huge and the recruitment in 2021 was by far the biggest years of young produced since we started monitoring it in 1990. And those year classes are moving through the population, right? So there's huge year classes. Everybody knows about the COVID bass up here and that's occurred. We've gone around right after that. We could go around to a whole bunch of lakes in this area and they were all have gone through that same exact explosion followed by unfortunately in 2022, 34 and 5 and 6. Terrible amount of recruitment over fishing again, bad year classes, etc. So it's interesting because right now, the fishing is pretty reasonable in many of the lakes around here, although they're still sort of small bass coming through their 5 and 6 year old bass. Some have moved through populations like that stunted population. They started spawning there two or three years ago and probably are already gone through. Others are just coming into spawning, but these fish are going to be moving through. Once that year class moves through and dies out with terrible year classes underneath, the fishing population, the adult population in these lakes are going to crash. hard and so this is what we're facing and it will be an eye-opener in a few years when all of the flesher men are out there going where did all of us just go so we need to start this now as a as a as a way of building up year classes after this four-year hiatus and bad bad year classes that have just gone on so that's where that's sort of where we stand and so we but so we because we had based on that COVID paper we convinced the ministry to allow us to do a proof of concept study from 22 to 25 where the first two years were before we put in sanctuary second two years was after we put it in and we documented that that in fact inside the sanctuaries we got five to ten time five four to five times the production of successful fingerlings at the end of the year successful reproduction was four to five times greater inside the sanctuaries than outside and that translated into eight to ten times more one plus recruitment individuals inside versus outside so the these bass boning sanctuaries are working fabulously even even probably better than we had anticipated and hope for so they work they will they will be an answer to the recruitment the chronic recruitment overfishing issue and so we we have proposed expanding that study next year to include 18 lakes with sanctuaries and six without any sanctuaries to serve as controls and we're still doing a backly design of before and after with the with the 18 sanctuaries lake studies so we've already collected data before on the last two years so we're gonna we're we're on track to start that sanctuaries in the spring of 2027 and start that in all in a number of lakes on the canal system all of these are in FMZ 18 and they're they're pretty much mostly that all of the lakes on the canal system coming up the redo from lower lower redo across to new borough and all the way down to dog and cranberry plus a number that are off the canal system like Charleston and devil and otter and otty and buck and low bro and a bunch of those fish those populations so we're we're seeing that and we're all set to do that can you talk a little bit about how these sanctuaries are gonna be put in place a little different since it's not gonna be through the ministry sure so we have we put in a proposal to the ministry and and and we've what we've done in preparation for all of this is to is to form a coalition of different lake associations once the data got out from our initial proof of concept study on these two lakes a whole bunch of lake associations in the area contacted us and said we want to have these bass boning sanctuaries in our lakes because we think our populations are knows diving as well so we formed this coalition for innovative fisheries conservation where we have lake teams and all of these we've delineated air we've visited the lakes we've swam the lakes we've determined areas where we we have these spawning sanctuaries we have determined our transects where we where we swim and and determine recruitment both inside and outside the sanctuaries we've got two years of data on the size structure the aggression levels the amount of reproduction it's occurring inside and outside before we put some of those into sanctuary areas so we're all set to go the proposal went in for this to the ministry and they chose to not support this which was a bit of a surprise to many people involved one might ask why in the world given that the consortium was proposing to do all the work pay for everything through Carlton University the fisheries conservation foundation and the University of Illinois to pay for everything out of research to provide all of the grad students and researchers associated with it and the lake associations would monitor lots of stuff we put all the signs up and do all of that basically for free so one might ask why in the world wouldn't the ministry want to do that and that is a question we're still trying to figure out now so what so but that's okay because we're going to do this in anyway in any way without them the only difference would be is that the the bass boning sanctuaries wouldn't be listed and defined in the annual regulations for fish of fisheries by the ministry so they might not be a citable offense they wouldn't be a citable offense unless we could show that that somebody was actually fishing for bass purposefully but that's that's not a problem it really comes down to the fact that you know so we have three CEOs in the area to cover about a thousand lakes so they have a job that is in effect impossible to do and interestingly as an example for the two years that the sanctuaries were in effect in Opinicon and Charleston and were citable there were zero citations provided by the ministry so it top down enforcement is never going to work effectively there has to be a community-based conservation ethic developed among cottage owners water users the anglers everybody involved whereby a conservation a community-based conservation program can be launched and effectively enforced through peer pressure and it all depends on education anglers and biologists alike and cottagers have to understand what's actually going on they have to understand what what bass do why they do it win and where they do it and how they do it okay and and so they have to understand that catch and release on nesting bass has a negative impact on recruitment and that if they want fishing to become better and sustainable for the next several generations everybody needs to pull their weight and everybody needs to understand that and abide by these rules and the rules basically are only putting 10 to 20% of the shoreline of a lake into these sanctuaries where there would be no fishing so everybody would have to agree to leave those bass alone for the reproductive season only these aren't like the permanent sanctuaries that are on the ends of various lakes that are off limits for the entire to all fishing for the entire year and by the way which don't act as bass bonnings bass bonning areas they're they most of them are basically swamps they're great for lots of things but they don't they don't protect bass bonners but these spawning area spawning sanctuaries that we would talk about would actually be effective areas that produce lots of bass bonning so and it would the rest of the lake would still be wide open to whatever illegal as fishing people want to do we actually think that by educating people about it all around that that would really limit the amount of illegal fishing going on and there'd be pressure from legal fishermen that are out on the lake to talk to anglers that are misbehaving and targeting bass everybody knows everybody that's a fisherman out on the lake can be looking at somebody and going that person is targeting nesters you can just tell what's going on so you can go over and have a discussion and we would have a large educational campaign built behind this in place well before this 2020 season opens we're already gearing it up we're having a meeting on Monday with our communications team for the for the our coalition to talk about the best ways to deliver and the timing involved and how we're going to do that it will be it will be a series of webinars and podcasts and written information on websites and learning modules and visiting the lakes and having materials to hand out we will probably be doing some krill surveys on each of the lakes inside and outside the sanctuaries where we would not be we're not going to be harassing anglers we'll just be telling them what the program is all about we'll be asking them what they're catching how they're catching fish you know how many bass they've caught we'll see what's going on but it's really to also interact on an educational basis to provide information because during this last proof of concept study when we ran into anglers that weren't in the sanctuaries, most of them, at least claim they didn't know, and I interviewed a lot of them, and they wanted to know what was going on, they thought it was a great idea, they said there's a whole another part of the lake to fish, don't worry about it, they thought it was a great study, and they all left really happy. And we didn't see them back in the sanctuaries again. So this was a pretty good indication, we got great compliance during those two years, and even this last year, when the sanctuary wasn't officially designated in the regulations, we still got excellent compliance in Opinicon and in Charleston. Charleston has a bit more complex design of the sanctuary, so it wasn't quite as good, but that's okay, it was still way better inside than outside, but we'll have, and we didn't also patrol it, like we will over the next few years, so we'll have, in all of these lakes with, all the 18 lakes with sanctuaries, we will have people on our lake teams and our research teams going out and visiting those, particularly doing some Creole surveys on the weekends when much of the fishing is going on, especially the big holiday weekends, you know, we'll be out in, in, in forest to try to edge, that's where we'll be able to educate people, and we'll have the, the lockmasters in the, in the tackled stores and the boat ramps, and the fishing lodges all behind this too, because it's in everybody's interest to have this, this initiative succeed, and for bass fishing to go into the future. So I guess we're going to have to have you back on, probably next fall, to talk about how this all went, in the lakes here around Eastern Ontario, and think that brings us to the end of our interview, the tough parts now over, and we ask every host, or every guest on, on the podcast, just final five questions. The first one is really simple, so what is your favorite fish? From a, from a, from a logical standpoint, it would be the black bass, right, the large mouths, it's blown up bass, they're, they're, they're some of my favorite species, one, they, they, they made my career, so they bought my house and sent my kids through school, put food on the table. So they're my favorite fish, but my favorite fish to fish for is bonefish, because there's nothing better than wandering around on miles and miles of, you know, beautiful sand, white flats, you know, walking among the sharks and the, and the rays, and, and fly fishing for the elusive bonefish, it's just the best. And what's your favorite memory from your career so far? Besides silly ones and, and kind of scientific, you know, the moments, I'd say that, yeah, my best, my best memory is the, the fact that the American Fisheries Society awarded the Fisheries Conservation Foundation, something that we formed and spearhead now, we formed back in 2004, but in 2021, they awarded, gave us the Carl Sullivan Award for the best fishery conservation organization in the world, and that was quite a, a great accomplishment for us. I don't know that, congrats, congrats. And besides being partially retired, what's your dream job or location to work? My dream job is the one I have. My dream job is definitely the one I have. Being a retired emeritus professor and yet still active with, you know, being on the direct, being one of the directors of the Fisheries Conservation Foundation. So, you know, it's, that's the best. So, wintering on Lake, I mean, summering on Lake Opinicon is fabulous, wintering anywhere warmer, you know, would be great. We still live in Illinois, but we, we don't put our heads on the pillows in Illinois very often, put it that way. And if money was not an issue, what is one project that you would like to work on? Like, somehow a national, international, basically a continental wide education, re-education program for anglers, biologists, etc. on basically what I was talking about before, explaining what fasts do, what fish do in general, when, where, how, and why. So that people actually understand rather what's going on rather than relying on what professional anglers say that don't have any real biological knowledge, passing on what everyone else says, so all these myths and dogmas that are out there that are basically just bad science. So, you know, our foundation was formed to deliver science to governments and decision-makers that need it, and everybody needs information. And so we're trying to, we're trying to develop a kind of a bass 101 is lead, lead program for this, and there are other, there are other energies and efforts going on to try to export education in a much better way. So that would be, that would be my dream project, the bigger, trying to, you know, on a larger policy, re-education campaign for everybody to get them to open their minds to actual real biology. And if there was one point or principle that you could have programmed into everyone's head, what would it be? Ah, it comes right out of what I was going to say. It would be, it would be to forget the agricultural approach to thinking. Most biologists were educated, you know, in departments of agriculture and they took road crops and, you know, animal husbandry and all of that. And basically, know all of the ways you deal with the besticated animals, but fish, bass in particular, said their wild organisms. So we have to take an ecological and evolutionary approach to their management, because life history is, life histories, their life histories are generating why they're doing what they're doing. Even though we may want them to do this thing, it's not going to happen if their life histories tell them to do something else. If they've evolved to do this, we're not going to get them to change. Okay, so we're managing right now like their sheep in the pasture. And we need to treat them like the wild organisms they are and give them that respect. So Dave, thank you for coming on the podcast today. It was a pleasure hearing about you and all of your work. And I think we're all excited to see what comes from the next year on all of these lakes. And if you yeah, I'm excited. I am too, Reagan, you know, we'll see how it all goes. You know, we're having meetings light right and left, but the good thing is the good thing is that we have a we have an unbelievable team probably. Sir, I say not bragging, but the best best research team in the world. And we do know what we're talking about. And so we will, you know, we can we can drive a lot of the arguments the correct way. The meeting that I came to two weeks. Amazing. Like those they care so much. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And it's fun working with them because it's yeah, they're they're supporting us. Right. You know, so we have we have grassroots grassroots support from voters. That will make it difficult. If people want to find out more information or get a hold of you, how should they do that? Our website. So probably the best on all of this would be to the Fisheries Conservation Foundation website, which is www.fishconserve.org. And if people want to get a hold of me, you can find us on social media at the fisheries pod or old-fashioned email at feedback at the fisheries podcast.com. I hope that you enjoyed this episode. You can download past, present, and future episodes on your favorite listening app or stream it from Spotify or the fisheriespodcast.com. And don't forget, you can help support the podcast with a monthly contribution through Patreon or by rocking some awesome fish past logo shirts, hoodies, and stickers available on Teespring. I'm Reagan Davis. Thank you for listening to the fisheries podcast. And remember, top down approaches are not going to work to effectively manage our recreational fisheries.