This is the most critical point of this whole thread...i have been attempting to make it clear. Again, I have a large stack of scientific papers illustrating that close to 10% of all fish caught in a tournament will not survive the following week. Doesn't seem like a lot but a a 20 boat tourney could easily catch 60 fish to be weighed in...there are 6 fish gone. And the study also makes it perfectly clear that the fish not surviving are the biggest ones brought to weigh-in

I also have work done on catch-and-release mortality numbers and that has been estimated as high as 4%, but during summer months it reaches 8%....again doesn't seem like a lot but how many of us regular anglers caught 150 bass this season....if you did thats at least 6 dead fish, and again its the larger fsih that die.


And mycept, overharvest of large fish does potentially cause stunting, that is one of the fundamental processes in fisheries management. I am taking this directly from the DEP lakes and ponds book, but could have just as easily taken it from my fisheries managemnt textbook "A decline in numbers of large bass due to harvest by anglers often results in an increase in numbers of forage fish, which include small panfish as well as young bass. High densities of small fish competing for a limited food supply causes the growth rates to decline. It then takes much longer for both the panfish and the bass to achieve sizes that would be of interest to anglers. The end product is a condition called stockpiling--an overabundance of small, slow-growing fish and few large ones. the most extreme situation occurs when overcrowding is so great fish become stunted. In these cases, fish grow so slowly that they never reach sizes desired by anglers. Stunting is more common is small ponds where fish abundance is very high, but predators and food are limited."

Since Rebel has stated there is no way to get a large boat on this body of water it is fair to assume that the pond/lake is smaller in size, so the potential for stunting is there. do I think there is any way what he did will create a stunted population, NO WAY. If 30 people go out and do what he did....YES. Bottom line, keeping BIG fish----not the best thing you could do to a system, but not the end of the fishery as we know it.