No such thing as overescapement. Maybe too many fish spawning for optimal use of the redd sites, and harvestable margins under utilized - from our perspective. Too much rotting fish can be deleterious to lake oxygen for the fry overwinter also, I understand, reducing the 4 year return, but that only affects fishermen and the economy, not the species over-all.
It really amazes me that those fish escaped extinction all those millennia before commercial fishermen came along to save the various species.
I should know more than I do but I don't.
What I do know is from 100 year old cannery records and there are more fish returning now than there were then.
I've just assumed that was due to management practices and the huge numbers today were not necessarily normal or ever typical of what it may have been a few hundred years back prior to commercial harvest effects.
They were pretty brutal on the BB fish back in the beginning of the commercial fishing era. It took a while before they figured out setting fish traps or nets on every river and taking all the fish wasn't such a grand idea. Learning curves are a bitch.
Just was not sure of what happens if there were an over abundance of fish on the spawning beds or a over population of fry in the lakes after the fact.
It's always said the escapement must be controlled for the good of the fisheries, never questioned it.
They will be fishing so I guess it don't matter.
I've had a young engineer type here at the house all day, we been making plans to head back down to the Glades to chase some Peacock Bass for a bit. He's been getting texts all day from a processor in Seattle who's trying to pin him down to a date he can head out, he just keeps blowing them off.
They want him yesterday, they are trying to get a crew together to open one of their plants.
