Interesting article by a member

[TIM HARTMAN]

Check out the article written by Dr. Phillips on Bassfan this morning. Some pretty interesting conclusions on tournaments during the Spring time.

http://www.bassfan.com/news_article.asp?id=3257

[Milt Waltermire]

I read Dr. Philipp's conclusions a while back. One of the things the article did not include was that he suggested that these off-limit spawning areas be protected in Illinois from April 1 through June 15 each year. There's obviously going to be a large outcry if this happens, but it's pretty hard to argue the research findings. The findings do explain one thing. I apparently was fishing for low vulnerability fish at Sara while many of you fished for high vulnerability fish. Yeah, that had to be it.

[Hank Groves]

I can see it now, the low vulnerability excuse will be coming up rather often by a lot of us. HaHa

[Milt Waltermire]

One other thing I forgot to mention. The offspring from the HV and LV fish was a result of a controlled situation where each class of fish were paired with others from the same class, i.e., HV males and females, LV males and females. This created a situation that led to Dr. Philipp's conclusions. Under these conditions, I'm sure he's right. But, does this really happen in the wild? Wouldn't there always be a mixture of these two classes of fish spawning together, creating offspring who become mixed into LV and HV classes? Let me put this another way. He mention an "explosion" of tournaments taking fish off nests. The explosion happened probably 10-15 years ago. I know for a fact that there are fewer tournaments now than 10 years ago, with fewer people fishing the ones that do exist. If tournaments have been taking all the HV fish off of nests for that many years, I'm surprised that we catch anything, because by now all that should be left is LV fish, if this study's conclusions are indicative of what's going on in our lakes and rivers. All I know is what I see and have experienced over the last 30+ years. The fishing is as good or better now than at any time over the last 30 years. Some lakes may have slid back some, others have improved. This can be a result of a lot of factors, including environmental or disease. I certainly am not challenging Dr. Philipp's work. It is simply the conclusions sometimes that I question. But, I'm fully aware I'm not the expert here.