This here. Well this is a sensible post. If you continue with this approach you will find others more willing to help.
Fish sticks and I both answered it. It's not a binary answer. Nor does it need to be. It's an ultimatum created to distract from the issue.
Because "recreational fishing" is all that matters right?
I would like to point out fishing opportunity is a fishing metric not a conservation one. And we are in the conservation forum. If you can fish for something or not doesn’t change the effect the species has on the food web or native species.
The problem is a lot of them are not organizations per say. For example one was just in a guys property we surveyed for the Sunoco pipeline damage we found and it was HUGE a massive spring with pens on both sides of the stream. I was like where do you put all these and he was just like little here little there little over there. I was like Ohhhhkkkk. Others I have heard about from people that are on farms. One I can see on my drive to work every am it’s just a spring that starts under a barn. 3 others are rod and gun clubs. One is a commerical level pay lake that has damed a massive spring that creates the headwaters of a wild trout stream near me that is infested with relatives of escapes.
There's one of these by my house. The guy created 3 ponds below the spring house next to his farmhouse and has several hundred trout in them. There's another one up on a class a stream with a similar setup except it's a concrete impoundment creating a spring pond that he stocks full of trout. A local angler messaged me about catching a bunch of "light'n trout" in the Class A and I pointed out that the spring pond has a pretty poor screen on it and it's probably letting them into the stream.
There was one more thing I forgot to include that was along the lines of what you had brought up in terms of mapping stuff. I was reading the wild trout management plan and if I recall I think issue 12 was connectivity. And it even mentioned there is an aquatic connectivity team that is assessing connectivity issues for native brook trout. Since we know these stocked trout can be a biological barrier to gene flow and negatively influence brook trout genetics in a significant way, the aquatic connectivity should be factoring this in and not just looking at the AOP scores of these Culverts as they only a piece of the connectivity information. Here is where mapping comes in. There is a GIS map I have heard that maps brown trout related connectivity issues I have to try and dig it up. I wonder if you could overlay a GIS map like that with stocking locations to provide a more accurate picture of connectivity for the aquatic connectivity team? This could be a great way to address issue 12 in the wild trout management plan.
The fish disperse and go on private property and class A streams where anglers can’t get at them and they can get at brook trout so maybe it wouldn’t be that accurate for long after stocking though.
So you don't think sport fishing is a conservation issue? hmm
Kurtz is the only one I can think of that had a formal name.
Sport fishing has to be taken into consideration in conservation in a bi directional way for example how will sport fishing activities effect the organism attempting to be conserved and what limits will social constructs of sport fishing impose on the logistics of conservation efforts for that organism. I am just saying that goals of sport fishing like higher catch rate, preferred species of angling are not conservation goals.
why are there so many hatcheries?
Do you think stocking trout is "conservation"?
No argument here. I will say, over the past two years in speaking with colleagues up and down the east coast, PA is an outlier on this mindset. I've had to explain things I always just assumed were normal to people and watched the shock on their faces. The "stocking authorization" issue is one of the glaring ones. When I mentioned that I had a few people suspect I was either joking or misinformed.
Yea that’s an important distinction you point out there between conservation hatchery designed to prop up threatened and endangered species and one to supply anglers.
