Size Matters but You Wouldn't Know It from a Survey of North American Game Fish Regulations

Many fishes have evolved large sizes and long life spans as part of a successful reproductive strategy. When fishing prevents individual growth and longevity, populations grow more slowly, fluctuate more widely, and are less resilient to other stressors such as pollution, habitat change, and invasive species. Given that sustainable fishing is a principal goal of fisheries management, it follows that our angling regulations should minimize impacts on growth and longevity – but do they? In this study we summarized angling regulations for long-lived, freshwater game fishes in the United States and Canada. A species was said to be long-lived if reproductive life span ≥ 15 years. With some notable exceptions, we found that most regulations either ignored size and age structure (e.g., simple bag limits) or encouraged the harvest of large, old fish (e.g., minimum size limits). Although size and age structure are independent of regulations when fishing pressure is either very low or very high, we argue that there is a lag between regulation and science that may have little to do with what anglers really want.