Maine Fishing Reports

March 11, 2008 - Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife

 

Weekly Fishing Report - From Our Biologists

The Ever-Changing Lawbook

How do you best manage fish populations?

That’s easy. Manage people! This may seem to be odd logic but since the last Ice Age fish have been taking care of themselves quite nicely. Then humans came along. We fish, modify habitat, and perform a number of other activities that directly and indirectly impact fish populations. As my college fisheries professor Dr. Ringler used to say, “Fisheries management is 98 percent dealing with people and two percent dealing with fish.”

For the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife’s Fisheries Division, the most direct method we have of managing the behavior of anglers is through the rules and regulations in our lawbooks. Like most other things, the easier a regulation is to understand the more useful it is. That is why over the last three years the Fisheries Division slowly has been making changes to the fishing lawbooks. Some of the recent changes include:

• Consolidation of bass regulations from 25 different regulation categories to five categories;
• Consolidation of lake trout regulations from 30 to 7 categories;
• Consolidation of brook trout regulations from 25 to 8 categories;
• Consolidation of landlocked salmon regulations from 16 to 8 categories;
• Combining the two extended fishing season, S-23 (Oct. 1-31) and S-24 (Oct. 1-Nov. 30) into one extended season from Oct. 1 to Dec. 31. This allows for expanded fishing opportunities on more than 2,000 waters located throughout the state;
• Modifying the layout to improve readability and highlight new regulation changes.

At this moment some folks probably are throwing their hands in the air yelling, “Maine fishing law books are too complex! They should be more like a ‘fill-in-your-favorite-state’ variety – one book for any state!” Without a doubt Maine’s fishing lawbooks include a lot of special regulations and for good reason. There are more than 6,000 lakes and ponds and 32,000 miles of rivers and streams in the state. The Fisheries Division staff spends the majority of their time in the field studying waters and analyzing data that guides our management decisions. As our understanding of fish populations within individual water bodies grows, so does the need to tailor regulations to meet specific performance goals. These goals can range from providing high catch rates to producing trophy-sized fish.

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