Individual-Based Model Describes Behavioral Feedbacks Between Anglers and Sportfish

Behavioral feedbacks between anglers and sportfish are widely recognized to be important in the management of sustainable and economically viable recreational fisheries. Quantifying these feedbacks empirically is difficult. Individual-based modeling has proven to be a powerful tool for assessing ecological processes that are difficult to quantify empirically. We used this computational-modeling form to simulate various assumptions associated with fishery-induced behavioral changes within an exploited fish population. These simulations result in robust-emergent relationships, over many model iterations, between empirically represented anglers and hypothetical sportfish.  This provides a theoretical framework for in situ assessments of behavioral feedbacks between anglers and sportfish. We compared this theoretical framework to empirically observed patterns in angler catch rates from recently opened reservoirs, naïve to angling. This allowed us to identify potential interactions between angling-induced behavior change, discard mortality, and heterogeneous angling populations as they relate to observed patterns in angler catch rates.