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History of FisnManagement 



Fish management can be defined as the art and science of producing 

 sustained annual crops of wild fish for recreational and commercial uses.^^ 

 But, this activity is not synonymous with fish farming, or the production 

 either of hatchery fish for put-and-take fishing or fish fry and fingerlings 

 for the purpose of stocking. Nor does it consist merely of regulations to 

 control the take of kinds, numbers, and sizes of fish (as when limits are 

 placed upon fishing seasons) any more than it is restricted to "habitat 

 improvement" per se. 



Nonetheless, fish management makes use of knowledge gleaned from 

 fish farming, the products of the hatcherv, legal assistance to regulate 

 fishing, and methods of habitat modification. However, these facets of 

 fishery husbandry and knowledge can be employed only when integrated 

 into a master plan that eliminates physical and physiological barriers to 

 the well-being of the fishes selected for management. Thus, as stated 

 above, fish management is defined as the art and science of producing 

 sustained annual crops of wild fish for recreational and commercial uses. 

 The reasons that we have stressed the words "art" and "science" should 

 soon be apparent. 



Dr. T. H. Langlois -^ in his studies of fish production in Lake Erie has 

 illustrated the complexity of factors influencing the fish in an aquatic 

 habitat by demonstrating that turbidity and plankton abundance control 

 the size of surviving year classes of important commercial fishes. We can 

 see from Dr. Langlois' study that the crop of fish available for capture in 

 any given year was not related to fishing intensity in past seasons, but 

 instead to th e amount of topso il carried into the lake during some pre- 

 ceding year when the fish being studied were hatching. Although naturally 

 no^ amount of legal regulatforTof the fishery can be expected to change 

 such a cause-and-effect relationship, the results themselves might be 

 changed by intensive soil conservation practices on the land in the water- 

 sheds tributaryloXaFe~Erie. This points~"up the importance and com- 



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