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Would you support?

5K views 53 replies 14 participants last post by  IceInTheVeins 
Probably. Smallmouth have a high tendancy to overpopulate, but I believe with aurora and chatfield there are plenty of predators to eat the young.

Two lakes that are waaay past their peak over here but still have some big bass that need protected are harvey and rifle gap. Harvey had a 6? something lb. smallmouth caught this spring and rifle gap used to have some real nice ones, I caught a 3.5 pounder a long time ago there. Harvey used to also have good populations of BIG largemouth too. No longer are the populations high in these lakes as the limits imposed were too high and poor and didn't protect the important fish, and these lakes cannot have warmwater species stocked in them thanks to ESA. Limits for both species of bass (not sure how many largemouth are in rifle) need to be 0 for these lakes for a long time to get them back.
 
Neal/CO said:
Trout do not wipe out walleye, people do! I usually agree with you, but not on this one. Rifle gap was never a true walleye fishery. It had a small wild population that got hammered, (I was there). If the DOW would stock walleye's at Rifle gap they would do fine.
I had an excellent post on this that didn't go through. It explained a lot of things on why the trout were a major cause of the declining of the walleyes and other warmwater species in rifle gap. I'll keep it short this time because I'm busy and don't have much time. Even if trout didn't eat smallmouth, largemouth, and walleye young (they do), overstocking of rainbow trout would still end up hurting the fishery greatly. Trout take up space, use up the plankton, insect and crustacean food sources, and eat eggs and bother fish spawning (stress.) In short, the trout screw up the food web of an ecosystem a great deal when overstocked and screw with the warmwater fish's niche. The DOW biologists know this but won't admit it; according to them trout don't eat food in the lake, and don't take up space. LMAO.

I'll explain more on this later.
 
Since DOW will not manage for warmwater over here (never is there a warmwater fish stocked hardly.), I really doubt they would want a slot limit or anything like that different than what they have now. The only slot limit they had over here for bass was on purdy mesa/juniata and now purdy is being drained. They want pretty much all warmwater fish gone from the west slope.
 
You've got a point neal. Powell someday when I get a big boat.
 
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