Just came across this and did not want to add to the other post about Jewies (ie did not want to change direction of original thread.
http://www.sunfishqld.com.au/
If you read in the Jan 12 Newsletter the Rec Fishing Advisory Committte of 26 Sep 11
has advised lowering the size from 75 cm to 45 cm and keeping the bag limit at 2.
Whether or not this will happen who knows but interesting to hear what everyone thinks.
Dave
Historian/Collector of Old Sidecast Fishing Reels
mate where in the site is the newsletter>Originally Posted by Da-Jew-Man
ken
Sorry Sunfish Magazine and scroll down to page 5.
Historian/Collector of Old Sidecast Fishing Reels
Unbelievably short sighted, wanting to kill fish before they have a chance to breed is in no way good for anyone, cheers wayne
FWIW, IMHO the most important element of this equation is establishing the average mortality rate of 45cm fish released after capture.
The jew stocks are now good and the sizes have increased dramatically, why would they drop the limit to 45?? Obviously all the smaller fish being released are growing out and the average size has jumped to being just under legal size for me last winter, it suspect this winter will see many more legal sized fish bring the average to just legal.
We should adopt the same approach to snapper next, min size of 50cm and in three yrs the average size caught will be nearing that mark.
Jack.
good point nigelr. post caught mortality is definitely a factor to consider i think when size limits are discussed along with length at sexual maturity, sadly these factors are often ignored for some reason.
anyway here is an extract from a study done on the black jewfish, a very similar species.
Results released today of a research project on mortality rates of line-caught black jewfish give a very clear indication that these fish are extremely susceptible to severe damage from barotrauma (pressure changes resulting from them being brought to the surface from depth).
The project carried out by Michael Phelan and a team from the Coastal Research Unit in the Department of Primary Industry, Fisheries and Mines, and with funding support from the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation, has conducted post mortem examinations of more than 100 jewfish caught at various depths and it provides very clear evidence that jewfish pulled from more than 10 metres of water have very little chance of post-release survival.
"Most fishers think of the jewfish as a big tough customer that can take a bit of handling but this research demonstrates that they are much more likely to suffer acute damage from barotrauma than we would have thought," explained AFANT President, Warren de With.
"Even if caught in depths less than 10 meters, they are likely to suffer damage unless they are quickly returned to the bottom. The researchers also found that many fish hooked on traditional 'J' hooks were likely to end up gut hooked with the hook in a position where it could damage essential organs. On the other hand, more than 90 percent of fish taken on circle hooks were lip hooked and the rest were hooked in the mouth."
"The research results mean that we can no longer really consider the jewie as a catch-and-release target unless we fish for them in relatively shallow water and handle them very carefully."
"AFANT is recommending that fishers working in more than 10 metres of water either change to smaller hooks to target other species or move off the jewfish once they have caught the fish they need to take home as there is little chance of any released jewies surviving if they are pulled from this depth."
"If you want to catch and release jewfish, only do it in less than 10 metres of water, only use circle hooks and use a suitable release weight to get the fish quickly back down to depth. Information on release weights will be made available at www.afant.com.au in the near future."
"We need to do these things ourselves to ensure the future of our jewie fishing and we also need government to implement the recommendations of the Possession Limit Review conducted last year that indicated we should reduce the limit from the current five fish to two or three."
if you reduce the size limit, i dont think people are going to stop fishing when they have caught and kept two small jewies. most people would keep fishingthus releasing more fish, but at least if you employ good practice handling and keep the size limit at 75cm they at least have a chance to breed once before being able to be taken. i think thats the best available management on a difficult species.
at the end of the day i would like to see study done on post caught mortality before i would support a reduction in size limit. for some reason sunfish dont need to see a study.....
Post-release survival of mulloway isn't quite as bad as black jewfish. It's quite good for lip-hooked fish from shallow water (<10% mortality), but gets progressively worse when the hook is removed from gut or throat-hooked fish (70% mortality). But this is for small fish (<35cm) from shallow water (in aquaria, actually) where barotrauma wasn't a factor. Once depths greater than about 20m are fished, mortality would definitely increase.
http://www.mendeley.com/research/rel...mus-japonicus/
http://icesjms.oxfordjournals.org/co...sr151.abstract
thanks. however, you could basically apply that post release survival result to any fish really when you exclude barotrauma and just talk about lip hook v gut hook. barotrauma is the biggest factor here and im pretty sure all croakers suffer from it.
Did any of your mulloway samples match with stocked fish out of curiosity.
They are NSW studies. Barotrauma isn't a factor for mulloway in estuaries, generally, but would be in offshore areas. The point of my last post was that post release survival is a combination of a lot of interacting factors. There are heaps of papers published on this subject and it's worth reading the stuff published by NSW by the likes of Broadhurst and Butcher.
Barotrauma affects different species in different ways. It depends on a lot of things. Pearl perch, for example, have very high post release survival even from 130m. Jewies and trag are different, although you can maximise their survival with good handling practices - best you'll do in deep water (>80m) is about 50-60% survival.
We are in the process of finalising some results for post release survival for pearlies, trag and snapper. I'll post the PDF when it's done. Pm me if you want some papers to read on the subject.
Matt
Still haven't got the samples I've collected analysed. I'll be sure to let you know when I do.
[QUOTE=tunaticer;1367683]The jew stocks are now good and the sizes have increased dramatically,
Obviuosly you do not live in the NSW Northern Rivers Area Tunaticer.
We have had 3 bad years in a row here and its getting worse with jew captures apart from restocked schoolies which are being taken when they are barely legal, and sometimes not!!
steve.
Funny you should say that rabbi, similar down here over the last 3 years.
Been a lot of barely-legal fish, that I've personally never really seen on the beaches in previous years, but very considerably less schoolies in the 4-10kg range that would once have been considered the norm.
AFAIK the Bellinger is not stocked; the last 3 years here have been a strong La Nina event with both a 30-year flood and a one-in-a-hundred year thunderstorm as well as innumerable minor flood events.
Sorry for the off-topic.....
Nigel
I lived in Urunga in from '77 to '93. My old man and my bro, along with a few mates, caught alot of big mulloway in the river mouth. We used to snorkel the main wall and very rarely saw a schoolie back then. Looking back, I find this a bit strange. Given the number of big fish we caught over the years, the smallest we caught was about 25lb although the techniques we used didn't really target the smaller fish. I saw one school of juvenile mulloway about 2ft long on the south wall one time, but that was it. We fished for jacks and caught heaps but now I often wonder why we didn't get a schoolie using smaller live baits (6"mullet) when fishing for jacks, compared to the big live (10-12"mullet) and dead (blackfish and tailor heads) we used for the big jewies.
Yeah Matt, I've heard some great stories of outstanding captures of larger mulloway, that it seems were certainly more common in those days compared to now, taken off South Beach in the 70' and early 80's.
Even in my time here, from 1980 on, to me the general fishing has deteriorated markedly. The whiting we used to catch, the bream run, even chopper tailor, numbers nowadays are absolutely nothing like they were even then. I truly can't remember the last decent run of snowy bream, and the days of catching a feed of choppers any afternoon there was a Sthly blowing seem to have disappeared.
I used to fish with some old fellas over here at North Beach, now unfortunately nearly all have passed away; the stories they told of the 50's etc were mindboggling.
Ironically atm I've stopped targetting mulloway because of the size of the current run of fish......more than happy trying for a nice greenback instead!
It's still a fantastic place but!
[QUOTE=rabbi;1367803]True enough there Rabbi, your sizes have dropped remarkably in the past three years according to the majority of the reports I see. Also this is a QLD fishing reg we are discussing and reports up here are showing a lot more bigger sized fish now than when the old size limit was in place that is akin your NSW reg.
I know I have targetted jew each winter for the past three decades and the average sizes are increasing quickly in the past few years. I guess you could argue that the smaller fish are surviving earlier releases quite well if the overall numbers are good.
Jack.
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