Radical Fishing

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But none of this should surprise us, according to Don Toews, former chief of sportfishing in Manitoba's Department of Natural Resources. "The basic assumptions of minimum-size thinking during the last 100 years are strictly from Mother Goose," he asserts. "It sounds so ideal, so lovely, that as we catch all the big fish, even trophy fish, the little ones will simply grow up and replace them, one for one. But that's just not the way it works."

The Nueltin experience involves more than trolling for lake trout and pikefroma boat.Here Hope fly-fishes forArctic grayling from a spot along the banks of nearby WindyRiver.

In any natural body of water, Toews points out, the population distribution of fish can be represented by an exponential curve, with small fish typically making up at least go% of the population. But protecting these already abundant small fish with a minimum-size law is a little like refusing to thin out densely crowded carrots or radishes in a vegetable garden. There is enough food for only a fraction of them. If none are removed by angling or other predation, then all remain stunted, growing only slowly. In addition, there is genetic evidence from streams controlled by minimum-size laws that fish tend to remain small and grow slowly because the larger, faster-growing fish are regularly selected out of the population, and into the fisherman's creel.

But any natural lake or river contains only a tiny proportionless than 1%—of truly trophy-sized fish. Not only are these the bass, pike and trout that anglers most want to catch; they're also the fish with the greatest potential for reproducing more big fish. In North American waterways long regulated by minimum-size laws, this very limited number of large fish have essentially been angled out, leaving these lakes and rivers with little or no genetic potential for producing trophy-sized fish 'in the future.

"Clearly," says Toews, "it's these large fish that most need protection. I don't know why it's taken us so long to come to grips with this, unless its part of our frontier mentality, our naive belief that there will always be more. But there's no doubt that angling laws will have to change direction, and quickly, if we expect to have any big fish left in 20 years." And the protection Toews calls for involves a group of prohibitions predictably called maximum-size restrictions, which were invoked at Nueltin Lake beginning in 1978, four years after it was first formally opened to flyin sportfishing.

Working closely with forward-looking "lake managers," first Bill Bennett, now Garry Gurke (private, on-site entrepreneurs who license the lake from the province), Manitoba Sport Fisheries has used the lake as a proving ground for protective angling policies. While a variety of restrictions more sophisticated than minimum size have long been used in several provinces and states-notably, "catch and release" laws on limited stretches of trout streams-Manitoba's big-fish protection program is the most successful and comprehensive *in North America.

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